New Year's Evil (1980)

Old sitcom stars will fall. New sitcom stars will rise.

New Year’s Evil (1980)
Directed by Emmett Alston
Written by Emmett Alston (story) and Leonard Neubauer (screenplay)

Tagline: "This New Year's, you're invited to a killer party..."

Well, a buzz killer party, anyway.

It’s nighttime in the City of Angels. Suddenly, we get sucker punched in the face with music as the focus puller dicks around with the zoom lens in an effort to make a Holiday Inn look sinister. (Frankly, just a shot of those small, scratchy, high school locker room towels would do it for me.)

Pinky Tuscadero is getting ready for her New Year’s Eve TV show (basically she’s Dick Clark without the dick, and sporting a red fright wig made from 100% cruelty-free Bozo pelts) and things aren’t going well. She calls her assistant Yvonne, a young black woman, who reveals that Pinky’s husband Richard won’t be at the show because he’s getting stinking drunk. (How that disqualifies him from attending a New Years Eve party she doesn’t say.)

Yvonne’s shower is dripping, which as anyone who’s ever watched a slasher flick knows, means that blood will soon be flowing. Sure enough, she reaches in to twist the knob and is grabbed by a black gloved hand out of an Italian giallo. A switchblade is clicked open, the music blares, and the attacker pulls the shower curtain in front of the camera so we can’t see the subsequent evisceration, because apparently he has the serial killer equivalent of a “shy bladder.”

Now let’s cut to an Oldsmobile convertible full of fake punks who cruise around and swig from liquor bottles, scream at passersby, and tongue kiss and strangle each other, but mostly spend so much time driving slowly down Hollywood Boulevard that I began to suspect they were this year’s Grand Marshals for the Santa Claus Lane Parade.

But the mark of a good slasher film is that we really care about the characters, and Pinky makes an immediate bid for our sympathy by ignoring her 18-year old, super-pretty blond son when he shows up at her hotel room in a tailcoat and bluejeans to present her with a bouquet of red roses, then watch her implied nudity through the wide open bathroom door. (I presume he’s just trying to work on his New Years Resolutions, which seem to read, “#1: Dress more like a character in a John Cougar song. #2: Try Sun-In Hair Lightener in the new convenient pump aerosol” and “#3: Really commit to the Oedipus Complex in ‘81.”)

Pinky launches her live New Year’s Eve broadcast, assuring us that “it’s time to spin out, and boil your hair,” then visits the phone bank, which looks like one of those pledge drives your local PBS station is always having, except the phones are bright red like Commissioner Gordon’s hotline to Batman, and everybody who calls in to vote for America’s Top 40 is a serial killer.

But enough death threats, let’s cut to Shadow, playing their smash hit “New Year’s Evil,” which we just heard in its entirety a minute and thirty-eight seconds ago during the lengthy Hollywood Boulevard credit sequence. But now we get to see the group in action, and while I thought I was pretty familiar with the raw L.A. music scene of the late 70s and early 80s, I honestly didn’t realize how much punk bands were into pink Zubaz.

Cut to our Killer, who disguises his voice by screaming through a kazoo, and asks the other characters to address him as “Evil” (which is stupid, but unlike Gretchen in Mean Girls, he actually succeeds in making fetch happen, so I guess I'll just go with it). He sneaks into an insane asylum, where all the demented inmates are watching the big TV show and slam-dancing to “New Year’s Evil” in pink hospital gowns (apparently the asylum washed their clothes in the same load with a punk band).

Evil dresses up as a male nurse so he can persuade a female nurse to drink Almaden brand California Champagne out of urine specimen cups (which seems redundant) and slow dance by the dialysis machine.

Meanwhile, Pinky phones her hotel room and interrupts her son’s attempt to overdose on barbiturates. Embarrassed that she caught him at a bad time, she promises to call back later, after he’s dead.

Evil and his bad bubbly-swilling buddy climb onto a gurney (with a pink sheet—seriously, is this a motif, or was there some massive RIT Dye spill in the L.A. Reservoir I never heard about?) and make the Nurse With Two Backs. But as the clock reaches midnight in New York, he turns on his tape recorder, opens his switchblade, and brutally stabs her to death. He’s still suffering from performance anxiety, however, so the actual murder is symbolized by a cutaway to an elderly man in a party hat blowing a paper “tongue” whistle into the camera. Or possibly I nodded off and hit my head and I'm just having flashbacks to Un Chien Andalou.

Evil calls Pinky’s show and plays back his murder. But there was a TV on in the background when he recorded it, and there’s a lot of traffic driving by his phone booth, so it sounds kind of like the low but excitable murmur you get in one of those smaller hotel-casinos off the Vegas Strip. I mean, yeah, you might be overhearing a brutal murder, but more likely it’s just a middle-aged woman cramming coins into the nickel slots like a French farmwife force-feeding a goose.

Cut to Pinky’s jilted blond son, who’s using a switchblade to angrily slice up a pair of his mother’s pantyhose. Unfortunately, the knife is dull and it seems like a lot of work for someone who’s taken a fatal dose of Seconal and really ought to spend less time on hosiery mutilation and more time slipping quietly into the gentle embrace of Death. But maybe he’s just bored; as we’ve already seen, there’s nothing good on TV.

Blondie pulls the pantyhose over his face and pushes a hatpin through his earlobe. I guess it’s supposed to be creepy, but given the way the reinforced toe flops cheerfully around on top of his head, he just looks like a Smurf with self-harm issues.

Meanwhile, Evil dresses up like a priest and starts cruising for his next victim, but accidentally and ironically rear-ends the Hell’s Angels, who take offense, and suddenly the hunter becomes the hunted, and the chase is on!

But we don't really have the budget for a car chase, so Evil immediately pulls into a drive-in to hide, where we get to watch trailers for other, better slasher films. We also get to watch Teri Copley smoke dope and get a breast exam before she went on to greater, if equally brief fame as the star of the made for TV movie I Married a Centerfold and the syndicated series, We’ve Got It Made.

The bikers are closing in, so Evil carjacks Teri's ride, grabbing her boyfriend and shaking him down for his keys, then sliding behind the wheel and checking his mirrors and blind spot before pulling slowly and carefully out of the Drive-In—all while Teri remains in the backseat, fussily buttoning up her sweater. So she had a good 30 seconds to step out of the car, but decided she’d rather spend that time avoiding a nip slip than escaping a serial killer. On the bright side, the abduction guarantees additional scream time.

Teri gets a lucky break when two drunk guys wander in front of Evil (seriously, this dude cannot drive ten feet without hitting something) and he has to stop to exchange insurance information, giving her a chance to flee. But despite being shapely, she’s really out of shape, and after sprinting for all of five or six yards, she just gives up and leans against a tree to await the inevitable off-camera knifing. (I’m no hero, but if I were going to die anyway, I’d like to think I’d at least try for the first down.) She’s saved by two cops who happened to drive by and notice a film crew shooting without a permit.

Evil goes to the Holiday Inn where Pinky is broadcasting, and despite phoning in death threats all night, he’s surprised to see that there’s security, and the cops are checking to make sure anyone trying to murder the star got their hand stamped first.

Pinky goes back to her hotel room to change, and finds her husband Richard dressed in a white track suit and a Stan Laurel mask. This appears to be part of their regular routine, because she seems even less surprised than we are when the mask comes off and we discover that her husband is actually Evil. Please don’t reveal the shocking twist ending.

Stan Laurel died in 1965 and he was probably still embarrassed by this.

Pinky boards an elevator with her beefy police escort, but Evil sticks a screwdriver in a junction box, shorting out the elevator and making it plummet down the shaft (at least, according to Pinky and the cop, who flail around like they're on bridge of the Enterprise and helpfully scream, “It’s dropping!”) Then he pulls out the screwdriver, de-shorting the elevator and making it stop. Pinky is fine, but the police officer loses consciousness, which doesn’t bode well for the LAPD (I doubt even Barney Fife could be cold-cocked by an elevator ride).

Evil gives a long speech justifying his incompetent killing spree; basically, the fact that their son is always mutilating his earlobes and wearing pantyhose on his head and committing suicide means that Pinky is a bad mother. So he intends to kill her, and afterwards, Evil says, “I’m going to the Rose Bowl game with my boy.” Clearly the unconscious police aren’t going to catch him, and his halfwit plan will probably come off without a hitch, but at least we have the satisfaction of knowing he’ll be stuck in that crazy-ass Pasadena traffic for hours. I know it’s not much, but these days I take accountability for rich white assholes where I can get it.

He handcuffs Pinky to the bottom of the elevator, then does the shorting out thing again, but the cops show up and start shooting and a stray bullet just happens to de-short the junction box and stop the elevator, which I find totally plausible.

Evil runs up to the roof, dons his Stan Laurel mask, and misquotes Hamlet to the cops, then leaves to browse the Craft Service table while some grips drop a tackling dummy off the building. Jilted Blond Son does a “Twas Beauty Killed the Beast” thing with his father’s track-suited corpse, then collects the mask, which you’d think the police might like to take as evidence, but you snooze you lose. And hey, it was the Eighties, and their Property Room was probably already overflowing with whimsical serial killer masks.

Pinky is loaded into an ambulance, and what do you know, the driver is dead, and her incestuous son is behind the wheel, wearing Stan Laurel’s face. I feel kind of bad for the kid—not because he had to do the lame sequel set-up for a movie that didn’t even become a franchise, but mostly because the last person to wear that mask was Evil, and the inside probably reeks of Aqua Velva and The Dry Look by Gillette.

Meanwhile, the announcer tells us that it’s midnight in Hawaii. Does that mean it’s time for our third reprise of “New Year’s Evil” by Shadow? Why, I think it does. By the way, the end credits are pink too. Which either means I need to adjust my monitor, or this movie was originally shot in black and white, and Ted Turner is just fucking with me.

Happy New Years, guys. And Please Spin Out and Boil Your Hair safely.