Annually, the Oscars’ “In Memoriam” montage neglects to include someone, and viewers with nothing better to do start complaining (on Sunday, it was Joan Rivers). I don’t play along. Instead, I usually sit there and say “Oh crap, I forgot he/she died!” (on Sunday, it was H.R. Giger), and give the Academy a nod of respect for honoring someone that few would whine about if they were excluded. In this year’s case, it was Menahem Golan, half of the Cannon producing team that gave us so many hours of entertainment during the 1980s, but rarely found much critical acclaim and certainly never earned them any Oscar gold (though Eric Roberts, Jon Voight and editor Henry Richardson were all nominated for Runaway Train). I’m sure there would have been a few tweets asking where he was if he had been left out of the annual morbid popularity contest, but since he’s the guy who gave us Superman IV and Over The Top, such outbursts probably would have been read as ironic.
No, Golan proudly gave us schlock, and that’s why I’m surprised he and his partner/cousin Yoram Globus presented us so few slasher films throughout their career. The most famous of the lot is probably Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (co-written by the recently departed LM Kit Carson, another surprise inclusion in the montage), due to the name brand and notoriety of its unrated release. But it’s not really a traditional slasher; to me, a slasher is a single killer (a surprise 2nd, like in Scream, is acceptable), and the Chainsaw series’ biggest asset is the family dynamic (part of why the solo Leatherface entry Texas Chainsaw 3D was such a misfire). For arguments’ sake I’ll include it in this depressingly short list.
Six years earlier, they contributed a pair of entries into popular “Holiday Horror” series of slasher films that glutted our multiplexes back in the early 80s. Thanks to the success of Friday the 13th (proving the earlier success of Halloween wasn’t a fluke), independent producers and studios alike were scrambling to nab every other holiday (Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc) or annual event (Prom Night, Graduation Day). Golan and Globus zeroed in on New Year’s Eve with the obligatorily titled New Year’s Evil, which hits Blu-ray today from Scream Factory after a long absence from respectable home video release in the U.S. (your best bet prior was one of those manufactured on-demand DVD-Rs that are often taken from VHS sources). Set in Los Angeles, the movie concerns a hip DJ (Roz Kelly) whos threatened by a maniac calling himself Evil. Whenever the clock strikes midnight in one of the other time zones, he murders someone in Los Angeles, cutting a path to where she is hosting a sparsely attended concert somewhere on the Sunset Strip.
It definitely sticks out among the other holiday horror movies; our killer wears no mask, and there is no central group of victims that he is choosing from. And we spend as much time with him as we do our heroine, giving it a sort of Maniac vibe at times albeit not as terrifying. The “9 oclock” kill scene is pretty suspenseful; he’s disguised himself as a doctor and sets his sights on a nurse working the late shift at a nursing home, but by the time they get to the next one at 10, the filmmakers start to get a bit goofier. After impressing a floozy at a bar by explaining he’s going to a party at Erik Estrada’s house (!), Evil gets a wrench in his plans when she brings her roommate along for the ride. Director Emmett Alston actually builds a suspense scene around whether or not Evil will get to kill her on time, which is all sorts of uncomfortable and hilarious (the would-be victim also talks about her bowel movements and new age meditation, so we’re kind of on Evil’s side). After that, he runs afoul of a biker gang, sending him into hiding at a drive-in and forcing him to select an 11 o’clock victim in a panic. At this point, he’s kind of embarrassing himself as a slasher killer; you can imagine Michael Myers, Harry Warden and the other holiday guys watching him bumble about and just shaking their heads. The more suspenseful side of things returns once he reaches Kelly’s party and a fun little twist is sprung on us, but even then we are treated to some goofiness, like Kelly’s son wearing her panties on his face for some reason.
I’m kind of fascinated by the film, specifically for these oddball reasons. It would have been easy for them to just hire ten good looking twentysomethings and have them attend a big house party where a killer set about offing them all before midnight. Instead, they did something kind of unique, and there really is nothing else quite like it.
There are two possible reasons for this; one is that it was actually a bit early in the slasher wave the film was released at the end of 1980, whereas most of the Friday the 13th cash-ins came along in 1981. So there wasn’t much of a formula for them to ape; in fact, it’s possible that the script was written before Friday the 13th was even released (and almost certainly before Terror Train, another New Year’s-set slasher which was released two months before NYE). The other is that it’s a product of a producing team more interested in action than horror, so of course there will be a car chase, a bunch of cops, and other stuff you don’t usually see in a slasher.
If you stayed for the original end credits sequence of New Year’s Evil, you’d be treated to a James Bond type promise of an upcoming film called Be My Valentine… OR ELSE! (the stinger is absent from Scream Factory’s Blu-ray, sadly). That title eventually changed to X-Ray, or Hospital Massacre, and it was released two years ago on Blu, also from Scream Factory. This one is more traditional; after a prologue depicting a childhood tragedy, we cut to the present day, where our beautiful heroine (Barbi Benton) goes to the hospital to get lab results and finds herself trapped there by a demented killer. The body count gets pretty high, and even though it’s horribly botched, there’s an attempt to make it a whodunit the murderer wears a surgical mask to hide his identity, and the script by Marc Behm and director Boaz Davidson even offers a couple of red herrings for those who couldn’t figure it out instantly (the mask only covers the mouth – so all you need to do is look at the killer’s exposed eyes and see who it is).
But like New Year’s, it’s also chock full of weirdness. There’s a trio of old ladies who just kind of hang out on the sidelines of the narrative and offer random insight, and a plot that hinges on incredible coincidence for the doctor/killer (he’s a legit doctor, not a guy posing as one so he apparently became a doctor for the sole purpose of getting back at this girl 20 years later). There’s even a scene where he hides from himself; as the doctor, he is with Benton when the killer comes snooping around, forcing them both to hide. Since it’s easy to see the actor’s face as both characters, it almost seems like there was supposed to be a twist where we find out that he has a twin brother or something, but that never comes, rendering the mystery somehow both incredibly easy to figure out and physically impossible to play out as depicted. It also barely acknowledges the Valentine’s holiday, so even though that original title was incredible, it’s probably for the best that it was changed to something a little less specific.
Now, you may look at these goofs as a clear sign of why Golan and Globus most certainly shouldnt have produced any more films in the sub-genre, but on the contrary, I think they robbed genre fans of so much entertainment by mostly sticking to traditional action and sci-fi movies after this. I love the slasher sub-genre, but I’ll be the first to admit it suffers from a lot of repetition. So many are cut from the same cloth that it’s easy to mix them up in memory. These two, for better or worse, definitely have their own particular charms, and even though other, more popular films had the same holidays, they’re still pretty unique. Neither of them seemed to be successful at the box office (I couldn’t find stats, which usually means they weren’t big enough to bother reporting), which probably contributed to Cannon’s shying away from such fare in favor of the much more lucrative action market, where their Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson movies kept their lights on until everything went belly up in the late 80s. True, they’d occasionally blend some horror into their action films (Bronsons 10 To Midnight, Norris’ The Hero And The Terror, and even Stallone’s Cobra has some terror elements in its first act or so), and Hoopers Lifeforce is a sci-fi/horror combo, but as far as full blown genre fare, it seems these two (or three, counting TCM2) were it.
I looked through their IMDb and BoxOfficeMojo pages, hoping to find a 3rd weirdo slasher in the mix, but turned up nothing. If you know of one, please let me know in the comments – I’d love to have a triple feature of schlocky, off-brand slasher movies from the immortal Golan-Globus team. Just imagine what they could have done with Christmas! Silent Night, Deadly Night might have looked kind of tame/normal next to whatever Cannon would have cooked up! Sigh.
New Years Evil hits Blu-ray today in a special edition that includes a commentary with director Emmett Alston (moderated by an incredibly obnoxious person), a fun retrospective with several key players, and the films trailer, as well as a solid transfer that improves on any version Ive ever seen.
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Brian, aka BC, has been watching horror movies since the age of 6, and twenty years later decided to put it to good use, both as a writer for several leading genre sites, as well as launching his own, Horror Movie A Day, which Roger Ebert once read and misunderstood the points that were being made.
