It's New Year's Eve So That Can Only Mean One Thing: I'm Rerunning My Piece on 1980's New Year's Evil
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Today marks the very first entry in TV at the Movies month here at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. It’s one of twelve theme months y’all picked for my poorly conceived, inelegantly executed project 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin, which is currently deep into its second year of non-success.
There are a few TV-themed choices for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, which is great, because I always love it when a movie checks off more than one box for me professionally and personally.
1980’s gloriously stupid, transcendently cheesy New Year’s Evil feels like it was made just for me. It pretty much checks all my boxes, not just the ones for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 and TV at the Movies Month.
For starters, it is a wonderfully representative product of Cannon pictures, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’ beloved schlock factory, a tacky time capsule ineptly attempting to exploit multiple fads simultaneously.
But it’s also a holiday themed slasher movie very much in the Halloween mold, right down to an atmospheric electronic score that feels like either the work of a second-rate John Carpenter or something you’d find on a cassette at a Halloween store called Spooky Synthesizer Sounds For Haunted Houses.
That’s not all! New Year’s Evil is a bona fide rock and roll movie, in this case a New Wave/Punk Rock shocker whose understanding of the nuances of rock and roll in the late 1970s and early 1980s is as impressively non-existent as its grasp of human psychology, law enforcement and entertainment.
With a running time of 85 jam-packed minutes, New Year’s Evil boasts the immeasurable benefit of brevity AND it’s a movie about live television at its most unpredictable and bloody.
Roz Kelly, who rose to fame as Fonzie’s girlfriend Pinky Tuscadero on Happy Days, stars as Diane "Blaze" Sullivan, a high priestess of punk and new wave who has risen to the top of her field by being oblivious to the fact that everyone in her nuclear family is an insane murderer out to kill her.
But I’m getting ahead of myself! Blaze is the ambitious host of New Year’s Evil, a live broadcast where she, second rate yet still moderately kick-ass punk bands Shadow and Made in Japan and telephone operators are counting down the year’s top new wave hits in anticipation of the clock striking midnight in Los Angeles, heralding the dawn of a New Year.
Blaze greets the crude caricatures of stoned punk rockers moshing in the audience with a blizzard of hilariously phony-sounding slang, cooing, “Hi, babies, it’s time to slam down and get even! It’s time to spin out and boil your head, you know!”
She’s in her element, doing a weird Mae West by way of Elvira Punk Rock Female Drag Queen routine when a seriously incompetent call screener lets through a live call from a man with a voice distorter who refers to himself as “Evil” who vows that he will murder “a naughty girl” at the stroke of midnight for several consecutive hours, to coincide with the clock striking midnight in various time zones.
“We’re really off to an interesting start, aren’t we?” Blaze tells the audience in a colossal bit of understatement but nobody seems remotely fazed by the lunatic’s murder threats.
Then again, if you went to a punk or a new wave show in the late 1970s chances were good you were going to hear a credible murder threat and, more often than not, someone getting murdered in front of your eyes.
That’s just how it was with punk: very murdery. If you were squeamish about getting murdered or seeing other people get murdered then you wouldn’t last long in the scene.
That is certainly the mindset of one of the cops called upon to investigate the threatening call. He lets Blaze know, in no uncertain terms, that by playing loud, anti-authoritarian music she was more or less implicitly consenting to being the target of an unhinged murder spree.
When Blaze asks for the police to help her not get murdered by the crazed lunatic threatening her publicly, the cop indignantly retorts, “If you’ll excuse my saying so, you’ve got to expect that from the audience you appeal to…You people amaze me! You create a problem and then you complain about it.”
I’m not really sure what problem he thinks Blaze created. I don’t quite understand the cause and effect relationship between hosting a New Year’s Eve’s telecast in which you count down the year’s top new wave hits and being killed by a lunatic with a voice distorter and a VERY ambitious schedule for murder.
Kip Niven plays Evil, a man whose true identity we do not learn until deep into the film’s first act. He’s a handsome misogynist who assumes the identity of a series of authority figures in order to get close to women he kills for being “naughty” but also because he has set an almost impossibly demanding timetable for himself and if he hesitates for even a moment there’s no way he’ll be able to execute it in time.
In that respect he reminded me of Frederick and Rosemary West. I read a biography of the notorious English serial killers that made them seem like two of the most evil and cruel human beings ever to walk this sick, sad earth.
Yet even as I recoiled in horror at their disgusting crimes, I couldn’t help but admire their ability to multi-task, to run businesses and buy houses and raise children that they often murdered but not all the time.
On the same level, Evil is a psychotic, woman-hating monster but damned if he’s not fiendishly efficient in realizing his horrible goals.
First Evil assumes the identity of a sexy, hotshot doctor to get inside a mental hospital and brutally murder a hot to trot nurse he seduces and robs of life in a matter of mere minutes.
Then he painstakingly puts on a fake mustache, which is the kind of wonderfully over the top detail that sets the movie apart, in order to go to a meet market disco and persuade a ditsy spiritual seeker to go with him to his car under the pretense that he is Erik Estrada’s business manager and has to go to a fancy party at his client’s home.
Incidentally, I once had the curious and surreal pleasure of doing a television show in Canada with Erik Estrada and he was such a shameless name-dropper that I’m surprised he didn’t mention being referenced very prominently by Evil the insane serial killer in the 1980 slasher film New Year’s Evil.
If I were Evil I’d be exhausted and ready for a disco nap after all that killing but he’s just getting warmed up. Then he dresses up like a priest and gets stabby at a drive-in movie theater before it is revealed (SPOILER) that Evil is in fact our heroine’s husband, who is not stoned to a place of incapacitation, as she had been led to believe, but rather has been out killing women at a horribly impressive pace.
Blaze’s homicidal hubby was moved to become a mass murderer by feelings of inadequacy because his wife paid more attention to her career than the needs of his fragile ego.
In an unfortunate turn of events, Blaze’s son Derek (Grant Kramer) has also become a psychotic, violent lunatic because his mother paid more attention to her career than the needs of his fragile ego.
From Derek’s very first moment onscreen, clad in a suit jacket and tie, with a bouquet of roses for mom and a look of subdued insanity in his eyes, it’s apparent that this dude has human heads in a freezer somewhere.
He might be as well be carrying a book entitled Norman Bates’ Guide to Women. Instead he tells his mother that he’s gotten a role in an upcoming television show and his mother brushes him off completely, never acknowledging that her son had accomplished something most actors, parents, and parents of actors dream of.
This makes it the second consecutive piece of entertainment I’ve watched where a parent is demonstrably unenthusiastic about their child being a successful television actor, after “The Wrap Party” episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
Like “The Wrap Party”, New Year’s Evil also prominently involves a legendary comedy duo, since Evil sometimes sports a Stan Laurel mask his son picks up at the very end of the movie, suggesting that in a sequel he would carry on his dad’s legacy of misogynistic mass murder.
That makes sense, since a young Aaron Sorkin wrote New Year’s Evil as a Medium Cool-like docudrama exposing the dangers of sexism and serial killing in the west coast new wave scene.
That’s not true! No one in New Year’s Evil’s creative team went on to do anything of note, leaving the film a glorious one-off full of weird personality and campy, lurid good-badness.
