Review of Evilspeak (1981) by Chris P — 04 Feb 2012

Another of the original video nasties - this time it's a cheap reworking of Carrie with devil worship and computers thrown in. Henry Coopersmith is a student at a military academy taken on as apart of a charitable scholarship. He's not particularly happy as he is mercilessly bullied by everyone there - including all the staff and it's only when he discovers an old crypt in the cellar of the academies chapel that he finds a bolt hole to escape his tormentors. Unfortunately for him a devil worshipping priest is buried there who promptly possesses the computer that Coopersmith is using to translate the priest's journal that he had found. With computer duly possessed it pushes him to perform a satanic ritual to give him power over the bullies.

Despite it's position as one of the most notorious (at the time) of the nasties this is for the most part pretty tame fare. The plot ambles along with Coopersmith being tormented and abused by everyone at the school and slowly cracking up. No one at the academy seems to think it's odd that their chapel is dedicated to a satan worshipping priest who had been excommunicated by the Pope as they're too busy making the poor lads life a misery. This is all from a time when home computers were only just surfacing (1982) and as such it was probably much easier to believe that they were near magical devices and that they could be ripe for use by malevolent spirits but it's still all pretty farcical.

After about 75 minutes of what is basically a character drama with a sprinkling of supernatural thrown in we finally get to the climactic scene as Coopersmith completes the ritual and unleashes the spirit of the priest and together they wreak a bloody revenge on the the bullies. Here it does get pretty violent as Coopersmith locks them in the church above and then bursts through the floor with a giant broadsword and proceeds to remove several heads from their relevant bodies. He floats about, aided by a pack of demonic pigs (no... seriously) and hacks and burns everyone in sight. Unfortunately this brief climax of carnage doesn't really warrant the long winded dreary prelude and so the film seems like much of a non-event.

As with many of these films it's difficult to see now why people were getting so worked up about them although maybe the scenes of Satanism were enough to convince the courts that it shouldn't be viewed by impressionable computer nerds in case they conjured up the devil via their ZX Spectrum.