Review #329: New Year's Evil (1980)
October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #2 - New Year's Evil (1980)
I kind of wish I had watched this as the first movie of the month; while it's only marginally better than Antisocial, it's much more the type of vibe I was hoping for with these holiday-themed horror films. (However, it spends even less time on New Year's Day than Antisocial did, so maybe I made the right choice.)
New Year's Evil is a delightfully cheesy 80s slasher. It starts off following Diane Sullivan ("Blaze"), a shock jock/TV or radio personality who is hosting a rock & roll-themed New Year's countdown in Hollywood where listeners can call in live to vote on their favorite rock song of the year. One of the callers, a man disguising his voice and calling himself "Evil", tells Blaze that he's going to kill several people- supposedly people that she personally knows, though I'll talk more on that later- on the hour, every hour, as each time zone in the US rings in the New Year. The movie goes back and forth between Blaze and the killer, as we watch his attempts to make good on his threat while the cops try to catch him.
This movie was fun, but it's one of those movies where the more you think about it the less it makes sense. The killer tells Blaze that he's going to kill someone close to her (and it really seemed like he meant each of his four kills was going to be someone she knew), but as far as I can tell only one of the kills actually was. (And that kill makes very little sense once you've seen the whole movie, because- no spoilers- it's strongly implied later in the film that the killer also had a personal relationship with his first victim, but his tactic for killing her was reliant on her only just having met him.) His whole plan seems very slipshod, he doesn't really seem to succeed at almost anything that he sets out to do, which on one hand is interesting because it's unusual in a slasher film but on the other hand, it really makes the killer seem like much less of a threat than he would be otherwise.
This movie does a lot of interesting things, though I'm not sure whether that should be seen as a good or bad thing. Like I said, the killer doesn't really have much of an actual plan, and the things he does succeed at mostly seem to come together at the last possible second. Also, where most slashers keep the killer's face secret until some big reveal, this killer's face is seen the first time he calls Blaze and is never really hidden after that. There is a bit of a secret regarding who he actually is and why he's doing what he's doing (like I alluded to earlier, he has some history with at least one or two other people in the film) but it's kind of a breath of fresh air to not try and hide the killer behind a bunch of contrived disguises and stealth tactics. But then again, the end result of this movie isn't particularly good, so might this have been better if the filmmakers stuck to a more traditional structure for the film? I don't know.
Anyway, this one gets some extra points in my book for the charming 80s aesthetics and atmosphere, but it's still a pretty humdrum entry overall. If you're looking for a fun slasher you could do worse than New Year's Evil, but you could do a lot better too.
Overall Rating: 7/10 Bar Floozies That Won't Shut Up About Transcendental Meditation
Goofs That Aren't Goofs: A scene of this film takes place at a drive-in theater, where the movie on-screen is said to be called "Blood Feast", which makes it sound like it's showing Herschel Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast from 1963. However, what can actually be seen on-screen is the 1972 film The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, which shipped under the working title of Blood Feast.
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