New Years Evil (1980)

This weeks review will wrap up our first annual Gory Little Christmas. Its been fun but now its time for a New Year, new movies, new challenges, and new posts on GLP. Since New Years is just around the corner we decided that a review of the cult classic New Years Evil would be appropriate. So sit back, relax and take a sip of something bubbly cause were bringing in the New Year with blood!

New Years Evil is another one of those video treasures I found as a kid. One of the countless holiday themed slasher films, does New Years Evil stand up to its competition? Not quite, but its a fun ride into early 80's slasher cinema. NYE offers up some tip top cheese and very little red stuff, but manages to have some interesting rhetoric. After watching NYE again...I'm curious as to what I found so interesting about it when I was younger.

NYE stars Roz Kelly of Happy Days fame, Kip Niven, and Grant Cramer who would later go on to star in the classic films Hardbodies, and Killer Clowns from Outer Space. The film full of cheese acting, sometimes it was almost comedic, however Roz, Kip, and Grant manage to do decent jobs with the script it had. Basically Roz's character Diane aka Blaze is throwing an on TV New Years bash when she gets a call from a Killer threatening to kill someone she knows at 12 midnight for every time zone. That's basically it. Its doesn't go a whole lot deeper than that until the end when you find out who the killer is.

The killer, you see his face the entire film, so you know who is committing the murders. What the writers thought was clever was revealing who REALLY is at the end...which was kind of a let down but it worked ok i guess. As I said earlier, this film did not live up to the height at which I had held it as a younger kid. It fell straight on its face. I lost much interest in the film about midway through, however I was pulled back in for the ending.  The most interesting part of the film was the soundtrack, which is a glorious 80's piece of work.

NYE really lacks all of the great qualities of a memorable slasher film...Blood, Nudity, Creative Killer, and kills that actually mean something. No jumps, no scares, no suspense. It was all so bland. I spend much of the film laughing than anything else. NYE is a mediocre slasher with bland kills, and bland everything else. However due to it being a holiday themed slasher it will be held close to my heart, even if it is very boring. NYE gets 2 out of 5 stabs for laughably bad acting and plot, as well as being extremely boring. Even with its bad pacing and silly story its still a fun watch in a group. NYE is finally available on DVD. View the trailer below.

 

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