Given all that bank made by Halloween and Friday the 13th, the immortal Cannon Films wanted to get in on some of that calendar-slasher action, making its stake on the holiday of hollow resolutions with the punny but cannily titled New Year’s Evil.

It’s Dec. 31 in Los Angeles, and the big show is the New Wave New Year’s countdown, Hollywood Hotline, staged at a hotel and hosted by Blaze, a supposed punk-rock diva played by a blah Roz Kelly (aka Pinky Tuscadero of TV’s Happy Days). The live show gets off to a grand start when a caller identifying himself as “Evil” says he’s going to kill someone when the clock strikes midnight at each of the contiguous United States’ four time zones, culminating in Blaze’s death.

What makes New Year’s Evil different from many slashers is that after the prologue, director Emmett Alston (9 Deaths of the Ninja) makes no effort to hide the identity of the killer. Evil’s played by Kip Niven (Magnum Force), he of the feathered hair, Fila track suit, occasional Bob Hope-esque mask and mobile tape recorder, which he calls a “miracle of modern technology.” Using a variety of disguises and pick-up lines (“There’s a big party up at Erik Estrada’s place”), he finds a woman or two to slay every hour, on the hour. “Auld Lang Syne,” bitches!

Among Evil’s victims are a nurse (Taafee O’Connell, Galaxy of Terror), a bar-hopping dumb blonde who discusses diarrhea (Louisa Moritz, The Last American Virgin) and a young Teri Copley (Brain Donors), whom he catches mid-makeout at the drive-in. The film’s “twist” is startlingly obvious to anyone who pays attention the overacting of Blaze’s sad-sack son (Grant Cramer, Hardbodies) in the early scenes, and Alston has one scare scene up his sleeve that I bet worked wonders in theaters. Regardless, Niven’s multifaceted performance is such a mad gas, it makes the movie well worth watching. —Rod Lott

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Single mom Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) has a problem: She can’t type worth a flip, and if only she could, she could make a better life for herself and her three children.

Wait, make that two problems, because she keeps getting raped in her rental home by a ghost. And Lord knows Mavis Beacon can’t do anything about that.

I suspect more people know about The Entity than actually have seen it. At my middle school, it was the talk of the lunch table, but the only friend who saw it was the one whose parents had split up. (She didn’t care what he watched; hell, she even let him eat marijuana brownies she made.) To the rest of us, The Entity didn’t sound possible: “How did they make her boob move like it was being squeezed if no one was there?”

To be fair, the sexual assaults are just part of the multifaceted film from Sidney J. Furie (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace), but they’re a large part, and why the movie remains remembered today. (Having the soundtrack drill an aggro-metal riff into your brain every time the malevolent force attacks tends to have a lasting effect.) But the poltergeist activity also grows to include flashes of weird-science electricity and little lasers that go pew-pew-pew like a vintage video game. The parapsychologists who arrive to help her are a trio later semi-parodied in 2011’s Insidious, in which Hershey played the mother of the haunted.

Not that I’m defending the ghost’s actions in any way, but Hershey is a very beautiful woman; The Entity makes me feel a tad ashamed for finding her attractive since I hit puberty. She gives a believable performance of a desperate woman no one else believes, but Furie does her no favors by allowing the screenplay by Audrey Rose‘s Frank De Felitta (based on his novel, based on “true” events) to go on as long it does: more than two hours. For chrissake, Sid, it’s a horny spirit horror thriller, not a Revolutionary War epic. —Rod Lott

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Arriving at the tail end of the Grudge/Ring string of Japanese-to-American horror films was One Missed Call, a Hollywood remake of a 2003 Asian film of the same name. By then, no one cared. They didn’t miss a thing.

The premise is that a college student receives a cellphone voicemail from his or her near-future self dying. (It even comes with its own ringtone!) Luckily, it’s stamped with the date and time, so he or she knows exactly how much time’s left on the clock. Then, as the imminent moment approaches, hallucinations of centipedes and Joker-faced people kick in. Death occurs, a piece of hard candy pops out of the corpse’s mouth (like a parting gift?), and someone in the freshly deceased’s contact list gets the next call.

So, yeah, it’s Final Destination with a family plan.

Since psych student Beth (Shannyn Sossamon, A Knight’s Tale) is rapidly losing friends to this accursed cellular scam, she teams up with a police detective (ol’ sandpaper throat Ed Burns, A Sound of Thunder) who lost his own sister in the same way to solve the mystery before they, too, get One Missed Call.

The characters in this stupid movie are stupid, so at least consistency is in place. In an effort to stay alive, they remove their batteries and they smash their devices. In fact, they do everything but the obvious: Cancel their contract or, if their carrier prohibited such a thing, change their damn phone number.

Equally dumb in French director Eric Valette’s film is the expected not-an-ending ending, which counted upon it being successful enough to merit sequels, as the Japanese original did. I, for one, am glad the Call was terminated here. —Rod Lott

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At once a tribute to Italian horror of the 1980s — “the times of Lamberto Bava, when monsters and dolls squirted blood” — and a modern-day attempt to reinvent it, Ubaldo Terzani Horror Show is more successful at the first point than the second. Regardless, it’s both comforting and disturbing that wardrobes of fright-film geeks in both hemispheres consist almost entirely of black horror tees.

Likely an onscreen substitute for sophomore Italian writer/director Gabriele Albanesi, the 25-year-old Alessio (Giuseppe Soleri) is a horror-flick nut and a wannabe filmmaker who’s too tied up in the splatter on which he’s been suckled for so long. His producer insists he try something more psychological, and sends him to Turin to collaborate on a script with the famous horror novelist Terzani Ubaldo (Paolo Sassanelli).

The author’s books prove mighty intense to Alessio, so much that they provoke explicit nightmares. Ubaldo delights in the madness that pours from his pen; in working with this young man, the mentor hides the degree of his nefarious intentions as he gradually becomes a corrupting influence — especially when Alessio’s girlfriend (Laura Gigante) comes to spend the weekend at the host’s insistence.

By and large, this little Horror Show is a twisted love triangle that delights in digging in to the gut-strewn genre that inspired it. Those sequences of pain and death are undeniably grotesque, in the unflinching manner of Lucio Fulci. Those who knows that man’s wet works are most likely to appreciate this flawed but admirably fucked-up valentine. That its final shot fades to a blur is no accident, as Albanesi smudges the line between fantasy and reality throughout. —Rod Lott

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The eyes have it in Anguish, a perfectly oddball horror film from Spain that’s obsessed with all things ocular.

Oh, and snails. It also really digs snails.

Future Oscar nominee Michael Lerner (Barton Fink) is John, an optometrist’s assistant and all-around schlub who lives with his kooky, bird-loving, pint-sized mother (Zelda Rubenstein, Poltergeist). John’s losing his eyesight, so with the help of Mom, who specializes in psychic hypnosis or something, he collects the peepers of other people. It’s good to have a hobby.

Nearly a third in, writer/director Bigas Luna (Jamón Jamón) pulls quite the fast one on us, revealing that all the action we’ve been watching is taking place on a movie screen. Within the rapt audience, one teen girl is particularly freaked the fuck out.

She has good reason to be, as her fellow moviegoers begin to be killed, just as John is offing innocents onscreen. If Luna’s trying to make an “art imitates life or vice versa” statement, it gets a little lost in the mess of the meta, but Anguish is really kind of ingenious and definitely ahead of its time. It would make a good double feature with Lamberto Bava’s Demons from two years earlier, which also plays with the trapped-in-a-theater concept.

When I was in high school, a local mom-and-pop video store was having a huge sale on posters, and I bought dozens, plus a weird countertop box advertising the VHS release of Anguish. It directed you to peep through a cut-out hole at its top, and any curious customers who did were greeted with a still of the film’s graphic scene of eye surgery. Just thought you’d like to know. —Rod Lott

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