New Year's Evil is a tense, good-humored, relatively bloodless entry in the slasher cycle that dominated horror films from roughly 1978 to 1984, which puts its 1981 theatrical release date right smack dab in the middle of the craze. It also belongs in the subcategory of holiday slashers with the likes of Halloween, To All a Goodnight, My Bloody Valentine and countless others. Obviously it has a lot of competition, so the question is: Does New Year's Evil hold its own with other films of its ilk? Is it better, worse? Does it stand out from others of its kind for any particular reasons?
First, let's have a plot rundown. It's New Year's Eve in snowless California and sexy female rocker Blaze (Roz Kelly of Happy Days fame, who turns in a very professional performance) will be making wisecracks and taking random phone calls during a televised concert she is hosting. You see, the concert is being broadcast simultaneously in LA, Aspen, Chicago and New York, each area representing one of the four contiguous United States time zones, and just before midnight in each zone there will be a countdown to the new year. As luck would have it, a psychopath dubbing himself as Evil and disguising his voice with a synthesizer calls in to warn Blaze that he will begin killing people at midnight in LA and continue to kill once every hour thereafter when the clock hits midnight in the other three time zones.
Blaze is understandably creeped out by the phone call and looks to the police for help; meanwhile, her actor son Derek (Grant Cramer several years before Killer Klowns From Outer Space) who's visiting backstage during the show (and who Blaze relentlessly ignores) slowly melts down while watching the show on a tiny television set, swilling down various pills with alcohol and stretching some of Mom's red pantyhose over his head.
Needless to say, the psychopathic killer meanwhile makes true on his threat and kills various women during each live New Year's countdown, recording his victim's screams to play over the phone to Blaze later. There is a plot twist revealing the killer's identity towards the end when the killer shows up to pay Blaze a deadly backstage visit at the end of the show, and I imagine the revelation will be obvious to some and surprising to others depending on the viewer's movie experience, but I think it's an intriguing twist for its time and possibly more unexpected than most of the "surprises" in this period's slasher films.
Well, to begin with, gorehounds will be very disappointed with this film, as there's no explicit violence to be found and, with the exception of one scene, the murders actually occur off camera. The only on-screen death is very suspenseful, and features a zany dumb blonde character (veteran character actress Louisa Moritz from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Last American Virgin at her zaniest) being suffocated with a plastic bag by the woman-hating killer in his car just as the clock strikes midnight. There is also a scene where the killer, masquerading as a priest, thrusts a knife into the gut of an obnoxious biker who's pursuing him at a drive-in theatre, but there's no blood spurt and we don't know whether or not the stabbing is fatal.
Aside from that, don't expect any blood or originality to any of the killings in New Year's Evil -- just good old-fashioned suspense. We know the killer is going to murder his victims just as the clock strikes midnight for each time zone, and with each victim the killer tunes into a New Year's Eve television/radio broadcast that provides a cheery countdown to each New Year. Now that is a great set-up plotwise for suspense, as we are meant to nervously wait for the countdown to begin and hope that somehow the unsuspecting victim is saved by some unknowable miracle just in the nick of time. Enhancing the suspense, Kip Niven (Magnum Force) gives a great menacingly low-key performance as the twisted, breast-mutilating killer, the kind of guy who from the outside you'd never suspect would be evil, but when you see him in action you believe it.
However, whether or not you like the characters plays a part in whether or not you fear for their demise, and I have no doubt that many would find Louisa Moritz as irritating as the killer does and hope she gets it quickly and painfully -- as a result, no suspense, just boredom and irritation. So it's safe to say that, while I enjoyed the characters and found the film reasonably suspenseful without the gore, suspense is subjective, and I realize that New Year's Evil is generally regarded as a trifling, boring, bloodless chore to sit through. I personally think it's quite entertaining, with some good moments of humor thrown in, a creepy plot and killer, better-than-average acting overall, an overall creepy atmosphere, and great musical numbers (I don't care who knows it, damnit -- I love the songs in this film, particularly "Dumb Blondes" and the title theme -- so gloriously 1980!)
I rate New Year's Evil a 7 of 10 and recommend it to slasher fans who don't require buckets of blood, but be warned -- it is extremely difficult to find and only available on a long out-of-print VHS release from Paragon Video.
