And a-BOO, it’s Burl, here to review a haunted house
picture! Ha ha, this is the type of horror picture perhaps – perhaps – most likely to actually give
me chills! I’ll tell you, when a subgenre can boast movies like The Haunting and The Uninvited and Legend of
Hell House, and even The Changeling
and Burnt Offerings and The Amityville Horror, you’ve got to
admit it has a certain power! It works on me, anyway!
The Evil is
another of those kind of movies, a low-budget iteration, sort of silly at
times, but still occasionally effective! Richard Crenna from Summer Rental stars as CJ, a dedicated
rationalist, a therapist by profession, who decides to start some kind of
clinic in the biggest, creepiest mansion he can find! And I’ve got to give the
filmmakers a great deal of credit here: they found themselves a top-flight
location for their purposes! Ha ha, the house – it’s so huge, is it even a
house? – is a sprawling estate with plenty of creepity potential, along with an
appealingly eerie backstory!
CJ’s ex-student and great buddy is played by Andrew Prine,
well-known from Grizzly and many
other genre works! He looks a bit like a handsome Frankenstein Monster in this
movie, ha ha, and ends up circular-sawing off half of his hand! But that
doesn’t actually seem to bother him as much as it would have bothered me!
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself! CJ’s ladyfriend is a sensitive type, and
so sees the shade of the house’s original owner beckoning at her and pointing
emphatically at his oversized special secret diary! It of course contains a
vital clue on what to do… about The Evil! Ha ha!
The house, having already incinerated its requisite
muttering caretaker, first locks in then sets about terrorizing, batting around
and fatally boo!-ing the team assembled to tidy up the old pile! Some are
electrocuted, others savaged by a hound or sucked into a mire! (Ha ha, shades
of Amityville 1992: It’s About Time!) The
house evidently enjoys clacking its shutters, and this it does a number of
times as the characters try to figure out what’s going on! Finally CJ remembers
about a creepy iron door he unearthed in the basement and removed the key of!
Down into the sulfurous pit they go, only to find… Victor Buono!
Ha ha, you got that
right! Buono, sporting an ice-cream suit, sits on a throne and insults,
belittles and gives Excedrin Headache #9 to Crenna! But the mystical key with
which the nefarious Buono can be locked back into his pit also serves as a
weapon in the right hands! Ha ha, I had to laugh at the little coda, where the
two final escapees emerge from the house after their ordeal, get into their car
as fast as they can and peel away! That’s what anyone would do of course, but
it just looked funny to see it enacted so purely!
It’s not a bad little picture, in the end, but not that
terrific either, and opinions vary greatly on the effectiveness of the Buono
segment! For some it completely deflates whatever atmosphere the previous
seventy minutes managed to gin up; for others it’s a camp masterstroke that
sets the movie apart from such contemporaries as, say, The Nesting or A Name For
Evil! It may go either way for you, or it may go both ways, which is sort
of how I feel! It drains the movie of its tension, sure, but at the same time
individuates it!
I liked the picture less this time around than on my
previous viewing many years ago, but I’m still not unfond of it! The cast is
fine, the house is grand and there are some eerie moments, if not enough of
them! (The same scriptwriter’s Superstition
was a more effective take on similar material, as I recall!) On balance I think
The Evil has just barely earned two
circular saws! Ha ha!
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