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Sunday 14 July 2019

Burl reviews Forever Evil! (1987)



Hi everybody, it’s Burl here with a new movie review! It’s high time I reviewed Forever Evil for you: a movie which, with its 107 minute running time (epic for a little regional low-budget horror picture) and its endless scenes of chat, well earns its title!
The tale is set in and around Houston, Texas, because that’s where the filmmakers lived! Our main character, Marc Denning, is played by Red Mitchell from The Outing and Night Game, and looks a little like Patton Oswalt mixed with Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings, with just a touch of Jack Black sprinkled in! Marc and his friends are making a weekend retreat to celebrate the completion of some new device invented by Marc and his brother, but the weekend turns sour when everyone but Marc is killed!
It’s pretty gruesome actually, because the first victim is Marc’s pregnant ladyfriend, who is found in the shower with the fetus ripped out of her! Ahh, yuck! The other pals are found with various fatal cuts and gouges, and some unseen creature with glowing red eyes seems to be prowling about! Marc gets his jeans shredded by the beast and must run around for the next fifteen minutes with hilariously shredded pants flapping around his legs! A zombie wearing a string tie appears and gets his eye gouged out, and finally Marc escapes - only to be run over by a car! Ha ha, but he survives!
In the ensuing investigation, Marc makes a new friend named Leo, who, true to his name, is a Law Enforcement Officer! He also meets a lady named Reggie, who, it transpires, is the sole survivor of an earlier, very similar massacre! And now comes the investigation, which should be the most boring part of the picture, but I love this kind of thing when it’s shot on 16mm film and acted out by competent regional players! Marc and Reggie, in the company of the skeptical Leo, discover the whole crazy thing revolves around a Lovecraftian Old God called Yog-Kothag and a local realtor who appears to be murdering people in an attempt to bring this evil demon back to life!
By now Marc has a head full of cracklin’ bran and a new look in which he wears a suit jacket, a pullover and a long black scarf, and limps around on a cane! Leo, who wears a three piece suit without a tie, declares “You’re lettin’ this Yog-Kothag thing get to you! Ha ha!” Shortly thereafter  the forces of evil first steal Leo's nice old car and then kill him, so Marc trades in his college instructor style for olive drab weekend warrior garb, grabs some popguns, and straps on his invention, which turns out to be a grappling hook that shoots out from a Batman-style wrist contraption! Ha ha, Reggie dons her khakis too, and they’re ready for anti-Yog action!
The string-tie zombie reappears, and the evil realtor admits that the zombie, at his direction, has been the one putting a poking on folks! “I’m a busy man,” he explains! “I don’t have time to go around killing people!” Ha ha! Though Marc and Reggie dole out a good deal of punishment to this cracker zombie, it proves hard to get rid of! Well, then there’s a small twist at the climax and the forever evil finally comes to an end!
Now, I can’t say this is a good movie exactly, but, like some other nominally boring regional horror pictures I could name (The Devonsville Terror comes to mind, or Fiend), it’s perfectly enjoyable if you enter into it in the proper spirit! There’s some inventiveness to the plotting, though not much, and a nice variety of spooky effects; but on the down side there’s perhaps a bit too much fetus-ripping for ol’ Burl’s taste! The trick effects involving the demon fetus are fakey enough that it’s not too bad, though! There's also a fantastic moment involving a paperweight that you will know when you see it! Altogether it’s a nicely ambitious bit of semi-amateur genre filmmaking, and I give Forever Evil two worthless old Stu-dee-bakers!

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