Saturday 3 March 2018

EVILS OF THE NIGHT

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

A candidate for a Stupidest Film Of All Time award, not just because it's a stupid idea and a stupid plot, but because absolutely everyone on screen is astonishingly stupid. Yes, it's kind of standard practice for people in dumb exploitation movies to do stupid things, but rarely have you seen so much idiocy, incompetence and ineptitude crammed into one film, and even the airheaded blonde bimbo characters are so thuddingly useless they actually give airheaded blonde bimbos a bad name. Three minutes in and you're already regretting it, with the realisation that you've been stiffed yet again, as it's already painfully clear that it's not going to be worth the effort involved in slumping in a chair in front of it.

A small squad of aliens led by John Carradine and ex-Catwoman Julie Newmar has come to Earth in search of blood which has to be taken from healthy (and crucially young) humans so the aliens can live another 200 years. They've hired decrepit pervy mechanics Aldo Ray and Neville Brand to abduct them from the lakeside and bring them to the nearby hospital where they're drained, but there aren't enough in good enough condition....

The aliens are stupid: they've flown halfway across the galaxy on a quest for human blood and are stuck in a small town during the school vacations, so why don't they relocate to a beach resort where all the holidaying teens are? (Instead, having failed this location, they just abandon the entire planet.) The mechanics are stupid: despite being told the teens need to be healthy and undamaged they're incapable of not beating them up, molesting them or killing them. And the teens themselves are stupid even by the standards of horror movie teens: permanently horny, standing about half naked, and so dumb that when one of the girlies slips her bonds, she needs to be directed in the ensuing fight by the still-tied-up jock - furthermore, once she's lost that easy fight against a 65-year-old halfwit, her best friend manages to get loose and has to be directed by her tied-up boyfriend as well.

Much of Evils Of The Night is little more than a thin excuse for softcore sex and nudity and supposedly teenaged women wandering around in bikinis (beyond the obvious, there's no reason given why one of the abducted girls has to spend the second half of the film without any trousers on). Some might argue that of course it isn't any good, it was never supposed to be any good, it was supposed to be a cheap SF/horror quickie for the undiscriminating teenage boy audience. In its actual defence, the spaceship landing and take-off effects are decent enough. But they amount to a total of maybe twenty seconds out of a film that runs 83 minutes. Obviously it's your choice as to whether that's an acceptable return on your investment, but personally I feel the bar needs to be set much higher. Made in 1984.

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