As he gleefully updates her on his tally, the police scramble to hunt the killer down before he achieves his goal...
I really should have waited until New Year's to post this, but the mental well has been a bit dry and this was the only thing I have seen worth writing about.
This movie is bizarre. I am honestly having trouble putting into words what the hell this movie even is. It is clearly inspired by the holiday-themed slashers inaugurated by Halloween, but that is where any relationship to human entertainment falls away.
Released in 1980, the film feels like a prototype for where the slasher was going. The genre had not coalesced yet - while the movie is familiar in structure one of the chief pleasures of the movie is how it deviates from expectations.
In other slasher movies, the focus is generally on a heroine and a small ensemble of victims in an established location. New Year's Evil throws this out the window, isolating Blaze from most of the action. Apart from receiving Evil's calls, she spends the movie MC-ing her new year's party, and ignoring her son Derek (Grant Cramer), who because of her neglect exhibits violent and weirdly sexualised urges that she appears to be unaware of (By the way, that is my analysis based on what the movie gives me - Blaze's interactions with her son make no sense, and we are given zero context for their relationship prior to the movie's beginning).
The one element that really sticks out is how the movie portrays the villain: in other slashers -and murder thrillers in general - the villain is kept offscreen to preserve suspense and a sense of mystery.
Here, the villain is shown from the beginning, introduced on a payphone, threatening the heroine with the film's premise. And as the movie progresses, Blaze is pushed offscreen, with Evil/Richard (Kip Niven) becoming the real centre of the movie.
We watch him meet his victims; we watch him kill them; we watch him trying to beat the clock to reach his next one. It is like a scummier version of Day of the Jackal.
Because we spend so much time with him, and because of his self-imposed deadline, the movie’s suspense is off-centre. Instead of worrying about Blaze or the victims, the basis of the suspense is ‘can Evil complete his plan by midnight?’ In another break from slasher villains, he does not wear a mask until the movie is almost over - an utterly inexplicable choice that sums up the movie.
Sometimes a movie can have unintended meaning. Watching New Year's Evil in 2019 was a strange experience - on the one hand, from a technical and a narrative standpoint the movie is vaguely incompetent, while at a subtextual level the movie is far more disturbing than it is on the surface.
The film was produced by the Cannon Group, at the time run by Menahem Golan and Yoram Golan. Their movies are fascinating for their ham-fisted attempt to ape trends in American pop culture, and New Year's Evil is no exception. While it features American actors and follows the broad strokes of a slasher movie, as a viewing experience it feels off in almost every respect. There is something very uncanny about this movie, from directorial choices to the ways characters behave.
The photography resembles a 70s TV movie with less of a lighting budget, the acting ranges from decent (Niven is pretty good as the disguise-switching villain) to wooden (the guard asking for the punks' tickets at the beginning is an automaton), and the film's ignorance of new wave music is hilariously off-base (there's a scene where 'punk' audience members mosh to a slowed-down blues number).
If I had watched this movie a few years ago I probably would have dismissed it out of hand, and laughed at Richard's motivations. I still laughed, but after watching endless news stories of incense, white supremacists and the last decade of GOP bullshit, this movie's bizarre focus resonates. As Richard rambled about why he was doing what he was doing, a question popped into my head that I have not been able to shake:
Is Evil's rampage really that ridiculous?
Sure, the movie world he exists in is a bizarro version of our own, but when you strip that away, all you are left with is an angry man who is upset because he feels he has lost his place in (patriarchal) society. Ultimately, despite the movie's perverse desire to romanticise his demise, Richard is a mediocre white man incapable of dealing with his wife's success. He is not unique - just read the comments under anything a woman tweets.
The whole story is ultimately about how Blaze's independence ruins her family. The movie cannot even give its ostensible lead character an opportunity to defeat her husband.
After Evil strings her up underneath an elevator, Blaze is saved inadvertently by the police who stop the elevator's descent - during a shootout with Richard, a cop's bullet hits the control box, stopping it from crushing her to death. Instead of sticking with our 'heroine', we follow a panicked Richard as he is chased to the roof of the hotel. Now trapped, Richard (wearing a mask ala Halloween which he has never worn during the rest of the movie) quotes Hamlet and dramatically jumps from the roof to the ground below, where he is surrounded by a crowd of onlookers and mourned by Derek.
The movie ends with Blaze in an ambulance driven by Derek wearing his father's mask, who has murdered the driver and clearly has similar intentions for his remaining parent. Just before the credits start, the radio announces that Hawaii is about to celebrate the new year.
New Year's Evil's attempt at a twist ending, with Blaze unable to escape her torment, ultimately feels like a tacit agreement with its villains' views. Even though Richard is dead, his rage has been transferred to his son, who will complete his mission.
A strange, silly mess of gender politics and mangled genre tropes, New Year's Evil is a strange offshoot of the rise of the slasher movie, and - dare I say it - in its bumbling way offers an unintentional indictment of the machismo it also appears to celebrate.
If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond called The James Bond Cocktail Hour. Every episode, we do a review of one of the books and one of the movies, picked at random.
In the latest episode we discuss the portrayal of women in the Bond franchise. Subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts!
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