‘I’ve not had a very good year…’
There are now horror films based on April Fool’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Halloween, Friday the 13th and Thanksgiving. It stands to reason that New Year’s Eve would be no exception. And so, in 1980, at the start of the slasher boom, Cannon Films, director Emmett Alston, and writer Leonard Neubauer gifted the world New Year’s Evil. Sure enough, it’s a wild ride…
On New Year’s Eve, popular punk-rock DJ Diane ‘Blaze’ Sullivan (Roz Kelly) hosts a late-night countdown celebration televised live from a Hollywood hotel. A strange man (Kip Niven) calls in claiming that he is going to commit a murder every time one of the US time zones hits midnight. Good as his word, women start being dispatched across the city.
This is a film of gimmicks. You’ve got a masked killer, a revenge plot, a troubled kid, the punk-rock element, plus the New Year’s Eve of it all. We know who the killer is from the beginning (Niven chews the scenery, but he can be genuinely unsettling when he wants to be), but the script does keep some information back for the trademark third-act twist. While the cinematography is rudimentary, I did enjoy the general look of this weird film. When the killer shows up wearing an incredible white tracksuit at the end, I knew that I was on to a winner.
The caveat here, of course, is that if you don’t like ’80s slashers, you won’t like this one. That being said, I genuinely found this to be more entertaining than the majority of films released in this genre from this era, and it should also be noted that the theme song (written specifically for the film by ’70s band Shadow) is a genuine banger. Top work all round.
