(1980) **
It’s New Year’s Eve and Punk rocker, Blaze, is hosting a live televised nationwide celebration from a Hollywood hotel. During the course of the event she intends to count down to the new year starting with the East Coast, then Central, then Mountain, all leading up to her big West Coast New Year’s celebration. As the party gets rolling she reminds viewers that they have the opportunity to call in and request their favorite tunes. Using a voice changing device, one of the callers, identifying himself as “Evil”, informs Blaze that he intends to murder someone as each time zone reaches midnight. True to his word he murders his first victim, records it on tape, and plays it back to Blaze over the air. With the clock ticking Blaze teams up with the world’s worst police inspector in a race against time to stop the next murder and unmask this deranged individual.
'Blaze' is a little long in the tooth
Wow, more 80s piffle that I did not know existed! New Year’s Evil is a low budget, lazy affair and it shows. The big New Year’s Celebration looks like it takes place in a high school gymnasium and the punk “icon’ Blaze is a bit too weathered to convince me that all the boys in the audience would be so star struck. Inexplicably the killer is revealed early on taking away any possible suspense this silliness might garner. The real reason to watch New Year’s Evil is because it’s a time capsule of how people in the 80s imagined how Sunset Boulevard must be with its portrayal of roving Hell’s Angels, punk rockers making a complete nuisance of themselves, and women flashing their breasts. Come to think of it, that is how I imagine Sunset Boulevard. The film contains many punk rock performances from the kind of punk rock bands that only seem to exist in movies like Return of the Living Dead. Throughout the film I was reminded why I dislike this kind of music so much. The other reason to watch this movie is because the killer’s mask in one scene is really good and I was green with envy the moment I spied it.
