Evils of the Night (1985)

Directed by:
Mardi Rustam

Back in the early 80s, Mohammed "Mardi" Rustam acquired the rights to a just-barely-screened 1973/74 horror film called Dr. Shagetz (originally titled And God Bless Grandma and Grandpa and then briefly known as God Damn Dr. Shagetz), which involved a mad doctor and a town full of compliant killer old people out to suck the chromosomes from young victims to sustain their own lives. Because the original film must have been pretty dry on exploitation elements, Rustam shot brand new footage featuring additional violence and gratuitous nudity from Playboy's Lynda Wiesmeier to spice things up. That was all cobbled together and finally released to home video as EVIL TOWN by Trans World Entertainment in 1987. However, two years before Town even made it to video store shelves, Rustam had already filmed and released this movie. Instead of something completely different he decided to just re-film most of the scenes he'd already shot for Town with new actors and then recycle the whole blood-draining-in-a-small-town Shagetz concept, only replacing the mad doctor character with aliens. Otherwise, the two films are pretty identical right down to many of the same characters, same exact scenes and even some of the same exact shooting locations like the hospital.

After some spaceship footage clearly swiped from another film, we see a completely different spaceship land in the dark woods, where two oblivious teen couples also happen to be smoking weed and messing around. One of the guys is strangled against a tree while in the middle of having doggy-style sex with porno actress Crystal Breeze. Billy (Tony O'Dell, later to star in Chopping Mall and the TV series Head of the Class) and his girlfriend are then kidnapped. When Billy comes to, he's on a stretcher in small hospital. Having taken over the place, alien doctors Kozmar (John Carradine) and Zarma (Julie Newmar), along with understudy Cora (Tina Louise), stay busy extracting blood from kidnapped young folks. They need the platelets to extend their life span by hundreds of years and the blood must be taken from humans aged 16 to 24. While two female guards are distracted, Billy decides to high tail it out of there. He sets off an alarm opening the door and is then hunted down by one of the guards and shot dead with her laser ring.

Near the clinic is a lake and a small plot of sand where all of the college kids just love to hang out and do things their parents probably wouldn't approve of. And since this apparently was made by a bunch of dirty old men, the cameraman keeps giving us close-ups of asses and crotches, a girl is shown giving a banana a blowjob and random shots of two topless girls rubbing suntan lotion on each other's breasts have been inserted here and there. The main focus however is on Nancy (Karrie Emerson, another Chopping Mall star), her fiance Ron (Keith Fisher) and their friends Heather (Bridget Holloman), Brian (David Hawk) and helium-voiced blonde bimbo Connie (G.T. Taylor). The quintet camp out at the lake for the night. After they sneak off to be alone, Nancy and Ron are chloroformed and dragged off by two men wearing ski masks. They're taken to the clinic where Ron is killed and Nancy attempts to find a way to escape.

The following morning, Heather, Brian and Connie awaken to discover their friends nowhere to be found. After spending a little time looking for them, they return to the lake, get kidnapped themselves and then are tied up in a garage run by grubby mechanics Kurt (Neville Brand) and Fred (Aldo Ray). The aliens have hand-selected these two dolts to do their dirty work because of their lack of intelligence and are paying them off with "gold" coins that they're only allowed to cash-in once they leave (and are worthless here on Earth). But the extraterrestrial visitors are already over these two as they have a bad habit of roughing up, beating, raping and even killing captives prior to delivering them, which makes their blood unusable. Because of that and the fact the secluded college town is nearly empty due to it being break, the aliens have decided to move on in a few days. Fred is ordered to deliver the last three victims to them at midnight but Kurt can't keep his hands off the girls, which gives a few of them the opportunity to escape.

Other than having their blood drained, victims are strangled, beat over the head with sticks and get killed with a tire iron, power drill, axe and laser. A high pressure air pump is stuck into an ear, which shoots blood out of the other side (!), and someone gets crushed by a car slowly lowered onto them by a hydraulic lift. Considering all that, this has very little actual gore. However, it does have gobs of nudity. Because none of the main actors wanted to do it, a bunch of adult film stars were hired to shoot inserts that are all crammed into the first 20 minutes, are completely disconnected from the rest of the plot and I doubt the other actors even knew anything about until they saw the finished product. Most prominent are Jerry Butler (billed under his real name Paul Siederman) and Amber Lynn, who are basically around to have soft core sex in an abandoned house and then exit stage left. Also worth noting that the co-writer, Philip Dennis Connors, only has credits in adult films other than this one movie.

The feeble, slurring Carradine is often unintelligible in his few scenes (though it's still always nice to see him) while 60's TV icons Louise ("Ginger Grant") and Newmar ("Catwoman") aren't given much more to do but at least look pretty good, especially considering they were both 50 when this was shot. Best of the lot are Ray and (especially) Brand as the sleazy mechanics. Ray gets a few fun overacted moments while Brand (in his final film role) channels much of what he did playing the whack-job Judd in Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive, another Rustam production. I would gladly watch him play a psycho in at least ten more movies but it was never meant to be. The non-porn younger actors were clearly chosen based on how good they look in a swimsuit, not for their acting, so we can't really expect too much out of them. Many sources claim 80s B movie queen Dawn Wildsmith (ex-wife of director Fred Olen Ray) is in the cast, but she's nowhere to be seen and that's definitely not her playing the role of the alien commander as she's frequently credited.

While companion film Town's VHS release was basically it being put out to pasture, Evils seemingly refuses to ever go away. After a 1985 theatrical run, it was issued on video numerous times (starting with the Lighting VHS) and there have been at least 3 DVD releases: through Shriek Show in 2006, MPI in 2014 and, finally, Vinegar Syndrome in 2016, who now also offer it on Blu-ray. As is typically the case, it's being marketed as some campy 80s classic but it's really just a plain bad movie where the fun moments are too few and far between.

★1/2

Beyond Reason (1982) [filmed in 1977]

... aka: Al di là della ragione (Beyond the Reason)
... aka: Hinter dem Jenseits (Behind the Hereafter)
... aka: Mati

Directed by:
Telly Savalas

After directing a handful of episodes of Kojak, Lt. Theo Kojak himself decided to take the plunge and write, direct and star in his very own feature. A vanity project? Perhaps, though it's more likely he was temporarily bitten by the artiste bug after helming a few TV episodes. Either way, the film was not successful on any front, didn't even make it to theaters and Savalas' filmmaking career both began and ended right here.

Dr. Nicholas Mati is a psychiatrist at a mental hospital who plays by his own rules. He's not above a little return slap to the face if need be, playing into delusions or even gambling with the patients. His "alternative treatments" have put him on the shit list of hospital director Dr. Batt (Barney Phillips), who gives him one last warning about his behavior before he takes him in front of the Board of Review for disciplinary action. Despite his facile "love conquers all" philosophy applied to psychiatry, his co-workers like him well enough and try to encourage him to play by the rules long enough for the director to get off his back. In addition to tending to patients, Dr. Mati also teaches. He recommends to some graduate students during a lecture that they forget "cold, clinical labels" and psychological diagnoses because of their stigma and because "specifics are not needed." In other words, approach each person - mentally ill or not - as the unique individual they are, just as he hopes to be seen for who he is: an unconventional doctor with his own unconventional methods.

Whether it be his cab driver (Bob Basso), his doorman (Milton Frome), his colleagues or his patients, everyone seems to want Dr. Mati's advice on just about everything. Little do they know, but he's actually the last person they should be asking as he's losing his own mind. Mati sees his complacent wife Elaine's (Diana Muldaur) painting change from a serene woman surrounded by flowers to a "depressing" mournful woman shrouded in black. He hears a voice on a tape recorder changing, rewinds it, re-listens and the voice is no longer there. His lectures start taking on a grim tone as he tells a future generation of shrinks they're in for a future of disappointment and frustration in their field and will eventually be "stripped of all the smug securities" of their education. And he starts hearing voices in his head, especially those of Leslie Valentine (Laura Johnson), a beautiful yet mysterious student he first encounters thumbing through some classified files she shouldn't have access to.

Just when things can't get any more disorienting for our deteriorating doc, someone with a newspaper clipping about a TV appearance he made in his pocket leaps to his death from the hospital rooftop and a patient mysteriously dies after having hallucinations of stabbing a baby to death in its crib (!) All of that adds to the visions and voices in his head. People and images change right before his eyes as Dr. Mati is eventually overwhelmed with various horror imagery, flashbacks, delusions, paranoia, loud voices and swirling camerawork. Leslie and her roommate Ann (Rita Marie Carr) also find themselves in danger after Dr. Mati links them to the suicide victim.

Oh, so you've seen this before? Same here. And yet, while this psycho-drama isn't great, I feel I must kind of defend it because it's also not nearly as bad as some may lead you to believe. It's not poorly made, the plot is coherent, the acting and dialogue are decent and there are some good scenes as well as some nice directorial touches here and there. What really holds this back is the sheer predictability of it all. There's simply not enough mystery, intrigue or twists in the script, nor enough insight into mental illness, nor enough visual panache, nor enough wit, nor enough of anything to make this stand out from loads of other psycho-dramas. Simply put: A lot of other filmmakers have covered this same ground already and done so with either far more style or for more depth.

The cast includes Walter Brooke as one of Mati's straight-laced colleagues, Tony Burton as a patient, Lilyan Chauvin (SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT) as a nurse, Toni Lawrence (daughter of Marc) as a student, Biff Elliot as a police sergeant, Susan Myers (who had the lead role in the made-for-TV Carrie rip-off The Spell the same year) as Savalas' daughter and blink-or-you'll miss it contributions from Debra Feuer (Night Angel), Denise DuBarry (Monster in the Closet) and former Miss California Melissa Prophet (Fatal Games). Telly offspring Nicholas Savalas, who was briefly in the tabloids years later for dating Tori Spelling and (supposedly) being verbally abusive to her by telling her "10 times a day how ugly [she] was," also has a small role as a student. It was produced by Howard W. Koch, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the time. The backers were Armenian, including Arthur Sarkissian, who'd later have more success producing the Rush Hour action / comedy series.

Actress Melissa Prophet describing how she met and worked with Savalas, including bits about this particular movie. Note: If she actually played a college girl hooker who turns into a devil then that was eliminated from the film as there's nothing even remotely like that here! (February 16, 1986 | By Cheryl Lavin, Chicago Tribune | FULL ARTICLE)

IMDb currently has this as a 1985 release, noting it was filmed in 1977 in the trivia section (Savalas also promoted the unreleased film in May 1977 at Cannes according to a Washington Post article). However, there's a VHS release from Full House Video out of the Netherlands that has a 1982 date on it, as does another European video release I found. I'm not entirely sure if this is the date of the actual video release or the date the film was copyrighted under a new name since there were several title changes. The 1985 release date seems to stem from the U.S. Media VHS release as well as it making its TV debut on CBS that same year. To complicate matters a bit further, TV Guide has this listed as a 1978 release.

So was this first publicly shown in 1977, 1978, 1982 or 1985? According to an article in the Las Vegas Sun dated November 27, 1977 (below), Savalas was still editing the film then, so we can at least scratch the earliest date off. After that, I'm not so sure. I'm going with 1982 to coincide with the European VHS releases until someone can prove me wrong.

One thing many sources do have wrong is that Priscilla Barnes plays Leslie Valentine. Nope! But she can be seen in the first scene as one of many medical students watching Mati interact with patients. She has no lines and isn't even listed in the credits. The fact she's often falsely credited with the wrong part stems from an intentionally deceptive early 80s trade ad in Variety (above) that attempted to give Barnes star billing after she became a household name replacing Suzanne Somers on Three's Company in 1981. Though religion plays absolutely no part in this film, the same ad tried to sell this difficult-to-market film as a religious horror and included an Omen-style upside down cross.

★★