I Watch Films: 976-EVIL

 

976-Evil

Spike lives with his aunt and his cousin Hoax. Spike’s cool, rides a motorbike and loses his money at the poker game in the projection room of the non-stop horror marathon cinema. Hoax is a nerd and loses his money to the bullies at school, some of whom are in the poker game. The aunt is very religious, and disapproves of her orphaned nephew, who keeps taking the money that she has for his upkeep until he’s 21.

Spike stumbles on a novelty fortune-telling phoneline, which he calls a few times. Then Hoax does as well. Strange things start to happen. Not that they were normal before, Spike lives across the yard (in a flat above the garage?) and Hoax has a pneumatic tube that he uses to send messages across, also he spies on Spike and his girlfriend.

The earlier bits are the most interesting, with Hoax being bullied, and Spike off-handedly helping him. Spike’s girlfriend gets annoyed when he leaves her at the cinema to win back his losses in the projector room, and goes off with Hoax to the diner (“When I get mad I get hungry” – she spends quite a bit of the middle section of the film eating pizza). Towards the end when the film tries to get spectacular the effects let it down, and a secondary reporter/detective character tracks down the phone line headquarters in an entertaining sequence that doesn’t really explain or add to the film. Very bitty, a little incoherent, which is sad for Director Robert Englund, better known as a horror actor.

Watch This: Some zany, crazy horror fun
Don’t Watch This: You want it to hang together, or the characters to make sense, or the effects to match