Exploring the Sequels

# 12 976-Evil

Call Me By Your Name, Satan.

Humanity’s collective fear of demonic forces dates back to at least the Paleolithic age and the concept of Satan around 550 BCE before further evolving into his more modern incarnation developed through the eventual explosion of Christianity worldwide. Through folklore and religious texts, The “Devil” and our collection of cultural demons’ primary goal, has been to seduce humans into the beckoning call of moral corruption (not a tough gig so far).

By still pre-internet 1988, one sure hellfire way to reach a large audience of pliable souls was via magazine advertisements and television commercials with the siren song of 967/900 numbers. These hotlines ranged from self help, gambling, trivia, and other contests marketing prizes. But the most popular were the impersonal phone sex lines offering gratification and exploration through one of our early creations of societal parasocial relationships where low risk/high reward safe spaces were created with low intimacy cost between the client and the operator. The only price paid was the $1.00 per minute or more charges customers accrued while talking to whomever stranger was fulfilling their fantasies on the other end. These type of hotlines became so popular that by this point, even the iconic Freddy Krueger had one himself by 1987 (horror trivia, not sex thank god).

So Robert Englund, holding some major (hella?) horror clout at the time playing the demon who built New Line Cinema through the 80’s, was ready to try his razor gloved hand at directing. Englund, staying close to what he knew, chose to develop a script by future screenwriting legend Brian Hegeland (A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, LA Confidential, A Knight’s Tale, Mystic River, Man on Fire) called 976-Evil. The story builds on our primal fear of the unknown, an obvious horror movie mainstay, and applies it to the idea that the number an unsuspecting victim may call and the stranger they are speaking with may be spiritually amoral or worse extramundane. A stultified single mom trying to make ends meat or something more sinisterly satanic? All it takes is one isolated soul to dial up the wrong seven digits and instead of putting down a credit card it will be literal hell to pay.

Rebel with a heart of gold, Spike (Patrick O’Bryan) lives with his maniacally religious aunt, Lucy (Academy Award nominee Sandy Dennis) and his pitifully nerdy cousin Hoax (Stephen Geoffreys), in the house he inherited from his parents after they died. Spike lives in a separate garage apartment outside of the house and he and Hoax communicate by sending messages through a long tube like a bank teller drive thru. Spike is a loner and mostly spends his nights on his dad’s motorcycle being worked on at Virgil’s Garage, hanging out at a round the clock, horror movie marathon theater called El Diablo (sounds awesome so far), and playing poker with a group of punks in the projectionist’s room upstairs chain smoking and swigging beer (you could do worse). These guys are less Spike’s friends and more of a means to end to risk it all including his money and his beloved bike.

The next day when the punks pick on Hoax in the school bathroom, Spike shows up to protect him and kicks ass easily, establishing to the audience that even alone Spike’s the bigger badass than these four guys together. Spike finds a flier for a horrorscope and calls the number not taking the creepy voice on the phone’s prediction seriously. The next night Hoax spies on Spike and his burgeoning girlfriend Suzie (Leslie Dean), having sex and after they leave Hoax steals her underwear she left and the horrorscope ad.

Later, while Spike is playing cards again instead of seeing the movie with Suzie on their date, and an angry Suzie goes with Hoax to have pizza at a local diner called Dante’s (Home of the Zombie Waitress). They bond over Spike and her fear of spiders, but the same gang of punks show up and brutally beat Hoax accidentally exposing him for taking her underwear. Disgusted, Suzie leaves. Hoax flees home, bleeding and bruised, and calls the hotline following the instructions from the evil voice which includes creating a pentagram circle and performing a satanic ritual in his bedroom that kills Suzie, arachnophobia style.

Meanwhile an investigative reporter (or private investigator, it’s not clear) named Marty (Jim Metzler) is on the scene after a plethora of fish rained down on Spike’s house days earlier (don’t ask me), Magnolia style. Marty finds the horrorscope as well, and makes a one thousand foot leap in logic that it’s the cause of the diabolical happenings, deciding to investigate the hotline with the help of Hoax’s teacher (or maybe the Principal, again not clear) Angela (Mary Rubell). Eventually the full powers of Ol’ Scratch are transferred to Hoax like a collect call, and after a complete transformation seeks gore riddled revenge on his assailants, and instigates a final showdown with Spike as he, Marty, and Angela try to prevent Hoax from causing further destruction when he opens a portal to hell.

Englund and Hegeland made 976-Evil in a time when the possessed teen sub genre was years into its cultish popularity. Other straight to VHS titles like Evil Speak, House 3: The Horror Show, Fear No Evil, and The UnHoly had or were making there beastial marks on horror fan’s television sets. There was even clear strands of demonic DNA connecting this to Robert Englund’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge with some Kruegeresque wisecracks to boot. But the classiest and foremost comparison, and maybe borderline ripoff on Hegeland’s part, is Brian DePalma’s adaptation of Carrie by swapping genders and substituting pubescent telekinesis with demonic assholishness. Both antagonists, Carrie and Hoax, commence as innocent, misunderstood outcasts with abusive religious zealot mothers, mercilessly bullied by their peers, that are thrust into the evolution of villainy, literally demolishing their own houses in the end.

Robert Englund made the savvy choice of casting Geoffries as Hoax, capitalizing off his cache as the similar, discreetly troubled outcast Evil Ed, in the commercially successful Fright Night (you may have heard me mention it). Geoffries is talented enough to take the gleefully grating, tragic weirdo energy of Ed and tweak it to a more virtuously naive, solitary mama’s boy. Both impotent characters, Ed and Hoax, adopt the power of supernatural entities they cannot fathom except Hoax seems to comprehend that he made the wrong choice by the time it’s too late.

Patrick O’Brian looking like a genetic remix of Kevin Dillon and Scott William Winters, plays Spike credibly as a tough guy with a soft side. Sandy Dennis plays up the white trash camp as opportunistic cat lady Aunt Lucy, all horrid wigs and gaudy night gowns, fully understanding what’s asked of her. Film and television character actor Jim Metzler and Maria Rubell as Marty and Angela, are mostly inconsequential and could have been left out of the plot unnoticed, but we do get a welcome cameo by Joe Dante all star Robert Picardo, as the owner of the horrorscope hotline.

The biggest hurdle is the surprisingly confusing script that takes its time in the first half slowly building character motivations and relationships before racing into more hurried, generic kills and final confrontations in the second half. Certain characters don’t fully make sense and disappear only to reappear later out of nowhere. This may be more bug than feature for some but if this were Giallo or Italian supernatural fare say Suspiria from Dario Argento, The Gates of Hell trilogy from Lucio Fulci, or Lamberto Bava’s Demons and Demons 2, we might applaud and relish it for its bewildering, non sensical plotting and bizarre characters as a foreign film with a focus on the visual style of bold color pallets and a surrealist mood over our own rigid reliance of cinematically concrete substance here in the states.

To a lesser extent like these European horror masters, Englund crafted a movie that’s slight on structure and plot and more about vibe, dark humor, and creative special effects by Kevin Yagher and Howard Berger. On a meager budget, the FX team created impressive demon makeup for Geoffreys and, for the era, a bravura final sequence of hell on earth as a frozen, snowy, hallucinatory dreamscape. Wickedness preserved in frost and rime. Strange and illusory, fantastical yet wholly beautiful. I wish 976-Evil would have dove deeper into such mystifying flourishes.

Even if the script doesn’t give Spike enough narrative space to expand on his relationship with Hoax building to a resolution between the two that doesn’t reach the emotional heights Englund may have intended, it still shows how a rot filled monster in their darkest hour, clutching their claws on to vengeance and hate, can find a moment of grace, regret, and the will to let go before falling into a fiery, sacrificial abyss. Geoffreys and O’Brian are not phoning it in, showing that although it may be too late to save ourselves we can still have the vigor to change long enough to make the right call, even if it takes a familial push. Defeating the devil is a tall order sure, but even if short lived, it still has a nice ring to it.

976-Evil is a movie about the faceless stranger drawing out the worst in each of us. A demon on the phone in 1988 isn’t much different than a troll on the internet today so heed 976-Evil’s message, rub some Dante’s pizza on your face, pop this in during your weekly poker game with 30 year old high schools kids, and let the movie’s horrorscope broaden your scope of horror movies!

Okay Horrorble Nation, after a St. Patrick’s Day detour next week (don’t stress peeps, it’s free!) we will return with 976-Evil 2.

***Free Bonus Trivia-be on the lookout in the projectionist room scenes as the walls are covered in horror movie posters including Maniac, A Clockwork Orange, and Fright Night!