Horror

New Year’s Evil (1980)

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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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Comedy

Sixpack Annie (1975)

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Looking like Reese Witherspoon with actual breasts, Lindsay Bloom (TV’s The New Mike Hammer) fronts the sexy, saucy and supremely silly hick pic Sixpack Annie. The young filly drives a beat-up Ford pickup truck whose seat she often shares with pull-tab cans of Miller nestled snugly in a dirty Styrofoam cooler. And she’s so hot, I’ll forgive the title’s error of not self-hyphenating.

The AIP cornpone comedy focuses on Annie’s attempts to save her aunt’s diner, where Annie waitresses in short shorts, from bank foreclosure. Her solution is simple: Just find a “sugar daddy.” In the small town of — ahem — Titwillow where she lives, works, drinks, trespasses, skinny-dips and speeds, the pickings are as slim as her waist, although everyone wants to bed her. That includes the guy they call Long John, whose license plate reads “9 INCHES.”

So Annie and her BFF Mary Lou (Jana Bellan, American Graffiti) head to Miami Beach to land a rich man, and take tips from Annie’s sister (Louisa Moritz, Death Race 2000), who works there as a flatulent, busty hooker. The jokes wrung out of every situation are goofy, sometimes stooping to the level of literally banana-peel humor. But damned if Bloom doesn’t go at it whole-hog, injecting the white-trash shenanigans with as much bubbly effervescence as the periodic bottle of Dr Pepper. The soda giant must’ve paid for the product placement, because it’s practically a supporting character.

Plus, Sixpack Annie boasts the best ending in motion-picture history, when the Titwillow sheriff (Joe Higgins, Flipper) puts on his hat and doesn’t realize Mary Lou has filled it with milk! And then he walks into a midget (Billy Barty) carrying a tray of cream pies, causing the desserts to smash in the little guy’s face! And then the angry dwarf gets revenge by smashing a pie into the sheriff’s face! And the sheriff is so mad that steam practically shoots out his ears! (Should I have added “spoiler alert” before all that?)

Also, there’s a song called “Them Red Hot Nuts.” —Rod Lott

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Action

The Evil That Men Do (1984)

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Here’s how you know The Evil That Men Do is going to be another Charles Bronson bad-asser: The film’s first shot is a slowed-down grab from a much later scene, of him throwing a knife just to the left of frame. This should’ve been used to start all his ’80s action movies, like his version of the 007 gun-barrel sequence; after all, Bronson’s post-Death Wish characters were pretty much variations of the same one-man-war assassin. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and in my book, there isn’t.

Dr. Molloch (Joseph Maher, Under the Rainbow) may be the sickest of all Bronson villains. Often seen wearing an executioner’s black hood, the physician schools the troops of some 20 countries in how to maximize pain and torture of one’s enemies. South America is the latest.

Meanwhile, professional hit man Holland (Bronson, duh) is enjoying retirement in the Cayman Islands when he learns an old buddy has been killed while trying to take out Molloch. Reluctantly, Holland agrees to assassinate the Doctor, and travels to Central American under the guise of a family man, with his friend’s widow (Theresa Saldana, Raging Bull) and daughter.

Directed by frequent collaborator J. Lee Thompson (10 to Midnight), the nicely nasty Evil is thought to be one of Bronson’s most violent pictures, and I can not disagree. For example, when the Mexican equivalent of Richard Kiel paws and licks a disgusted Saldana in a bar, Holland subdues the giant by grabbing his penis and bending it, eventually using both hands. I had to wince and cheer. But Evil is not without humor, too, like when Holland is trapped under a bed while lesbian-loving occurs above him (the evil that women do?), and he’s practically smashed by the moving mattress. Dammit, do I miss this guy. —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Entity (1982)

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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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