EVILS OF THE NIGHT (1985)

EVILS OF THE NIGHT (1985)

Tagline: Alien vampires have just landed from outer space... in search of the one substance they need to survive... TEENAGE BLOOD!

(Horror, Sci-Fi, What The Heck) [R]

The only protection we need is from you. Goodnight Brian!

In this one space aliens land and they really need all the teenage blood they can get in order to survive. To accomplish this, they convince a couple of really creepy mechanics to be henchmen in a small town to capture vacationing teens and bring them to a makeshift hospital. Now as it’s nearing time for the aliens to leave their henchmen to engage in ever-increasingly murderous measures. 

First off, if you watch a lot of 80’s horror you know that there was just a lot of no-holds-barred stuff going on and this flick is no exception, except that a lot like some of the more exploitive films of the time, this one goes way out of its way to cram a lot of nudity into this thing. That seems to be the main reason a lot of people watched it. This doesn’t mean they didn’t somehow get a great cast for this. I ended up watching it because of Karrie Emerson who I really liked in CHOPPING MALL. Unfortunately, what we ended up getting is on a crap level that exceeds the “cheese” level. You never want that, because then you end up with actual garbage like TRICK OR TREATS or GRADUATION DAY. 

This thing starts off pretty mellow overall but ends up going full horror in the final act. The pacing is pretty bad, the acting is pretty bad, the score is pretty bad, the soundtrack is just okay and somehow it’s actually not the worst horror flick of the 80s. So at least it has that going for it. 

Acting wise aside from Karrie, a lot of the other cast seemed to be just doing this movie for a paycheck as their careers were declining or over for the most part. Even Karrie would stop acting altogether about 4 years after this one came out and this thing and CHOPPING MALL were the only 2 horror flicks she appeared in. David Hawk ends up carrying most of the weight in this movie as Brian but this was his only feature film and he was only in one other TV show. Needless to say, he’s terrible in this but at least he can say he was in a movie. It appears the legendary John Carradine is phoning it in as Dr. Kozmar in this, but he would actually go on to make 11 more movies and TV shows after this thing before passing away in 1988. Tina Louise is in this a fair amount as Cora, but if you don’t recognize the name, she is most famous for playing Ginger on TV’s “Gilligan’s Island”. Julie Newmar appears as Dr. Zarm and gets a decent amount of dialog. She is best known for playing the Catwoman in the original Batman TV series. This was also Neville Brand’s last movie. He was best known for 1980s WITHOUT WARNING which was another horror flick with aliens.

When it comes to the special effects everything is gloriously low-budget and I kind of loved that, but I really didn’t like this thing overall. It’s not a “repeat watch” flick for me. There is a segment in this that seems to last about 30 minutes where our teens or “young adults” are tied up in an auto mechanic shop waiting to be taken to the aliens. Let’s just say that the stupidity of the people in this movie is astonishingly stupid. I think in order to have an 80’s horror flick you have to have some idiocy, but the idiocy in this movie is so over the top it makes our current Presidential administration seem like they know what they are doing. 

Overall this thing is just too loaded with bad everything for me to give it any higher than a 2 out of 7. It’s just very rough in spite of the cast. It also should have been called something different like ALIEN BLOOD HOSPITAL or KILLER MECHANICS or something like that.

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF MARS PRODUCTIONS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.