FOREVER EVIL (1987)
This will be a hard movie to describe. I'm up to the challenge, but forgive me if I sound...conflicted? I don't know, man. Parts of Forever Evil are interminably boring, yet other parts recall the resourceful horrors of The Evil Dead. Of course, there is a caveat. It doesn't hold a candle to The Evil Dead, nor does it possess the wax required to fashion such a candle. Aside from sharing similarly miserly budgets, the two films have comparable plots. Friends gather at an isolated cabin to play cards and discuss high-tech inventions (just roll with it). It doesn't take long - like, at all - before one of the girls is gutted in the shower. She was pregnant, but the fetus is missing. Other characters turn up dead, one by hanging and one by off-camera methods. The killer? Well, how about a Lovecraftian god? I definitely appreciated the film's cosmic bent.
Forever Evil was shot on 16mm, which looks glorious. Again, there are moments that flirt with brilliance. The surrogate villain is a ridiculously rotting zombie, and the film just stops at one point so that our baddie can pull out his own eyeball. That. I needed more of that. Regrettably, the exposition is abound with pages upon pages of sardonic dialogue. The talking never seems to end. I wouldn't mind the, shall we say, patient pacing (the acting is actually decent), but the running time is...go ahead, guess. Would you believe 106 minutes? And the director's cut is even longer! Somehow, I came away from this b-lark with a dopey smile on my face. When it goes, it goes hard. If I were Joe Bob Briggs (oh, let me pretend), the drive-in totals would include occult frippery, demonic baby fu, and gratuitous pyrotechnics. 3.5 Z'Dars. Joe Bob says...er, Dom says check it out.
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