New Year's Evil follows two characters (three, if we count the prominently featured rock bands): Diane 'Blaze' Sullivan (Roz Kelly), a punk rock/new wave DJ hosting a countdown celebration (on air? over the radio? The movie doesn't make this clear, and I'm not even sure that is in the top 10 flaws scattered throughout this movie). During said celebration, she received calls from a man calling himself 'Evil' (Kip Niven) who tells her that he will kill someone each hour as the clock strikes midnight in different time zones. As Blaze is in LA, that means we will get at least 3 kills before she herself is in the targeted time zone. She works with the police to try and keep the killer on the phone so they can locate him (the police, unsurprisingly, fail)
The B plot follows Evil himself as he goes around killing various women at the designated times. And it shows him to be a rather bumbling murderer, only successful by accident.
For about 60 minutes of the movie, we navigate back and forth between those two plots and a third not-plot: Performances from the above mentioned rock bands account for a much higher percentage of the film than you would expect. The last 25 minutes focus on the main stories, but this movie is stretched out by long music sequences, while they are fine as far as music goes, this isn't Sinners level music we are getting.
The movie is fairly basic as far as plots go, but also fairly tame as far as slashers go. None of the kills are especially graphic, the language could be much worse; really, the music aspect is pretty much the only thing that stands out for this movie aside from the weird arc of the killer.
We see the killer early, though he uses a voice changer when calling Blaze. Other than his first kill (second if we count the cold open kill, but we can ignore that as it doesn't meet the 'midnight for each time zone' requirement), he kind of sucks at murdering people. His second target brings along a friend that forces him to do extra work (extra work he didn't have to do! He was wearing a disguise and could have left after murdering the first woman!) and before he gets to his third target he is chased by a biker gang.
Yeah, there is a whole sequence of him interacting with and running from a group of bikers that is more obvious padding than even the long sessions of rock music. The only benefit from it is another bonus non-midnight kill that is also not very muted in execution. He kidnaps a woman to be his third victim, but fails - forcing him to head to Blaze having followed through on two of his promised midnight kills.
Now, we see the killer's face early and often - part of his plotline is seeing the various way he changes his appearance - but for some reason we are also treated to a weird red herring character - Blaze's son, it's not really a spoiler given how obvious they play it - but we have already seen the killer's face, why are you doing this?
Said son, Derek is played by Grant Cramer and look, I have tried to avoid saying someone is outright terrible in my later reviews. I'll point to the writing, maybe miscasting, try to point out how it doesn't work, but I have been trying very hard not to say any one performance is outright terrible. But Grant Cramer, bless his heart, is not very good in this movie and makes me struggle to keep that mindset. He is much better in Killer Klowns from Outer Space 8 years later, but this was a very rough first movie.
The movie does have its charms though: It is very much a time capsule of 1980 (though it might've been slightly outdated by then?) so you see lots of fun costumes and some dated turns of phrase, and there is something to be said for seeing an early slasher before they took over horror in the 80s.
Would I recommend this movie? I mean, it's not great, but it isn't terrible either. It's... acceptable? If you are in the mood for a slasher and there is nothing else to watch, it isn't a bad way to spend 85 minutes, but generally, there are going to be better options available.
5 out of 10
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