• Directed by Roger Evans
• Written by Freeman Williams
• Starring
  • Red Mitchell
  • Tracey Huffman
  • Charles L. Trotter
  • Diane Johnson
  • Howard Jacobsen

Longtime readers no doubt know what they’re in store for when they visit this site: Reviews that are often long, occasionally witty, regularly pedantic, and usually downright irrelevant. That last condition will be in evidence in larger quantities than usual this time around, because Forever Evil has been covered on the internet in far greater proportion to its influence, distribution, and viewership than just about any B-movie in history. Why? Because the writer, one Freeman Williams, went on to become Dr. Freex, proprietor of The Bad Movie Report, and one of bad movie fandom’s great cuddly godlike figures. Freeman’s even gone so far as to post an eighteen-chapter account of the genesis and production of Forever Evil for all the world to see. So between that and the dozen other reviews floating around in the e-ether, anything I have to say will either be redundant, superfluous, or just plain wrong.

What can I say? That’s the kind of guy I am.

Our story opens, in fact, with Mr. Freeman Williams wearing his acting hat. (This is, I should note, the original video release version of the movie; the currently-available two-DVD set also contains the slightly longer director’s cut, which doesn’t open with this scene. But I decided that the more familiar version is the one I should review here. And I’m two lazy to watch two marginally-different cuts of a movie for a single review. What can I say? That’s the kind of guy I am.) Freeman here plays the role of Ben Magnus, a Tarot reader and generally occultish spooky guy. He is, however, a good guy, as demonstrated by the fact that his card reading, meant for his ditzy customer (Kayce Glasse), instead gives him the warning that he’s been targeted by demonic forces that he’s pissed off. Alas for both Ben and his customer, tarot card red alerts don’t give much in the way of a time margin, and Ben soon finds himself on the receiving end of an animated lightning bolt, being wielded by a hooded figure with glowing red eyes.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Freeman Williams!

Our plot proper starts with Marc (Red Mitchell) with his girlfriend Holly (Diane Johnson), getting ready for his last weekend party at the family cabin before they toss the keys to their realtor (Howard Jacobsen). Marc and Holly are in a bit of a bind, as she’s pregnant and hasn’t decided what to do. But they put on a happy face and greet Marc’s brother Jay, his significant other, and another couple. I’ll list the actors here for form’s sake — Jeffrey Lane, Susan Lunt, David Campbell, Karen Chatfield — but I’m not going to bother with the character names, because you’re not going to have much chance to get to know them.

That’s right, they’re cannon fodder. That evening, a mysterious something starts killing them all, starting by ripping Holly’s fetus out of her stomach. The other characters react with not nearly the level of panic you’d expect, but even their levelheadedness (or stolid non-emotiveness) saves them; by the end of the evening, everyone has either been pulled down a dark hallway by something with red glowing eyes, torn out the window by tree branches, or just plain broken by a towering zombie figure, who (we find out in the end) goes by the name of “Alfy” (Kent T. Johnson). Marc alone escapes, using the brilliant plan of running through the woods onto the highway and getting himself hit by a car.

“Huh. Dead body. Well.”

That all happens in the first twenty minutes, because the point of the movie is to pick up the real story where the standard slasher plot ends: With the sole survivor recovering from the night of slaughter. Putting himself back together in the hospital, Marc meets two soon-to-be-important people: Lt. Ball (Charles L. Trotter), the officer investigating the deaths of his friends, and Reggie (Tracey Huffman), who is herself the “Final Girl” of a similar attack a couple of years back. Together, they try to discover a pattern to this and other massacres carried out over several decades, and keep similar attacks from happening again.

They’re given a good lump o’ clues by the now-absent Ben Magnus, who leaves a box of occult books upon his disappearance for his good friend Lt. Ball. Together, they point to an eldritch power known as Yog-Kothag, an exiled dark god with scattered cult followers. Bits and pieces start to fall together from the unlikeliest places, such as an archived newspaper article which notes that a mystic dagger was stolen from a museum just before the first such attack several decades back, or the fact that astronomers have discovered an “irregular quasar” whose whose history of pulsing periods lines up precisely with the timing of all of the murders. It seems that it’s something that happens only “when the stars are right.”

Kids, this is what “Google” looked like when your parents were young.

There’s a tidiness to the way in which pseudo-Lovecraftian mythology is woven into a slasher-zombie plot without overt reference (though, yes, Magnus’ box of books does include a copy of the ubiquitous Necronomicon). And you have to remember, this movie was made (or at least conceived) before the Golden Age of Leaden Sequels, in which the ultimate fate and further story of both the sole survivor and the murderous nasty are routinely examined and remilked for further box-office fodder.

But there are some recurring weaknesses that keep cooling the elements of the movie before they can achieve critical mass. Just about every actor plays their role as well-adjusted, overly-phlegmatic people, even in the fact of unbelievable violence; the general reaction of Marc’s buddies in the opening sequence seems more appropriate to a perniciously-clogged toilet than to the grisly deaths of their compatriots in quick succession. And Reggie, introduced to the story after having spent a couple of years criss-crossing the area in search of the demons that killed her fiance, looks and acts like a suburban soccer mom. (When not watching a game.)

Marc and Reggie, “dressed for Texas.”

And the less said about Marc’s “secret weapon,” his wrist-mounted grappling-hooked gimmick-on-a-stick, the better.

One of the reasons I declined to watch the director’s cut in favor of the video release version (aside from the afore-mentioned laziness) is that seven additional minutes of footage doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would up the tension level. With so much of the movie revolving around investigation, self-recrimination, and a succession of spooky dream sequences, the last thing this movie needs is a more languid pace. (Well, actually, the last thing it needs is a scene in which the murder sites, plotted on a map, turn out to be a pentagram, but since we already have one of those…)

“Rrr… Benzocaine… Benzocaine!”

Having said all that (and spoiled my chances of a Christmas gift basket from Freeman this year), it’s certainly not a terrible little movie. The mistakes which pepper it are not the mistakes of stupidity or apathy, but those to be expected of unpracticed intelligence. There are plenty of good ideas here, just without the connecting tissue of experience among the largely-neophyte movie makers. But especially against the backdrop of the slasher-plotted movies of the early ’80s, Forever Evil doesn’t come out so bad.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 4
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0