976-EVIL (1988)

A movie about a premium-rate telephone number with satanic connections, directed by Freddy Krueger himself? That was what this particular entry in the occult section of The Horror Movie Survival Guide's Supernatural chapter was selling me and, naturally, I was intrigued. But I didn't see it for the first time until 2011, when I happened upon the old bare bones DVD at McKay's. I was all the more interested when I looked at the cover and saw it starred Stephen Geoffreys, who was Evil Ed in Fright Night, one of my favorite vampire movies and horror movies in general, especially of the 80's. But, I got to say, I wasn't all that impressed when I watched 976-EVIL, and that was very apparent in my original sparse and not very complimentary review. Upon recently re-watching it for this update, I'd hoped that it might improve a bit or I would find it more entertaining, now that quite a bit of time has passed; unfortunately, that didn't really happen. It's still not an entry of Movies That Suck, as it's not out-and-out horrible, and it is, in fact, fairly well-shot and directed by Robert Englund, something I appreciated a lot more this time around. But, I don't find the story all that interesting, the characters are really underdeveloped and not people I can get invested in for 92 minutes (though, admittedly, that's partly the fault of the truncated theatrical version, which is the only one I've seen), it gets downright silly as it goes on, clashing with the tone it initially goes for, and the basic concept is inherently dated since 976 numbers went out of fashion a long time ago (do any premium-rate numbers exist anymore?). But my biggest issue with 976-EVIL is that it's so... average. If you'd never seen another horror movie in your entire life, you'd probably think this was amazing, but, save for the satanic phone line angle, there's little here that hasn't been done numerous times before, and done better as well.

Hoax Arthur Wilmoth is a small, geeky, and insecure teenager who, along with his cousin, Leonard Johnson, whom everyone calls "Spike," lives with his domineering, fanatically religious mother, Lucy Wilmoth. Lucy is overly protective and smothering towards Hoax, forbidding him from doing anything that she feels is even slightly blasphemous, and sees Spike as a bad influence. Hoax is also routinely picked on by a gang of local thugs, the leader of whom, Marcus, runs the projector at the local movie theater. Though Spike does look out for Hoax as much as he can, despite often playing poker with the gang, even he is sort of annoyed by his cousin. One night, while flipping through a magazine, Spike comes across an ad for a "horrorscope" number: 976-EVIL. He tries it out a couple of times and it encourages him to simply take whatever he wants. Though he does take some of his aunt's money to pay off a gambling debt, he later opts not to steal an expensive set of biker gloves that catch his eye at an auto parts store. Because he didn't given in to the number's temptation, an evil force attempts to kill him, nearly running him down with an empty car that starts up by itself. He's saved in the nick of time by Marty Palmer, a man claiming to be a reporter, who talked with Lucy earlier about a strange occurrence that happened just after Spike first called the number: fish falling from the sky, into their yard. Later, after spying on him and a girl named Suzie while they have sex, Hoax snoops around Spike's room and comes across the ad. He also tries out the number, and it encourages him to go to the movie theater to find the girl of his dreams. When he does, he runs into Suzie, who had an argument with Spike, and the two of them go out to the local diner and have a nice time. However, it's ruined when Marcus and his gang show up. They not only beat on and humiliate Hoax, but reveal that he took a pair of Suzie's panties that she left in Spike's room. Angered, Suzie walks out on Hoax, who's left to the bullies' mercy. Later, he again uses the number and performs a ritual it describes, intending to scare Suzie out of revenge. However, it results in her dying, much to Hoax's horror, and he soon finds himself changing in a frightening manner. But it also gives him the ability to get back at those who've wronged him, and so, he completely gives himself over to the number's evil power. Now, it's up to Spike and Palmer to stop Hoax.

Obviously, the reason why Robert Englund was able to try his hand at directing here was because, by the late 80's, he was the new big horror star after having now played Freddy Krueger three times. He directed 976-EVIL in the fall of 1987, following the big success of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors that past February, and though he's said he would've preferred his directing debut to have been something other than a horror film, he liked the screenplay. Said screenplay was written by Rhet Topham, who'd previously written Trick or Treat, and Brian Helgeland, who would go on to be one of the writers on A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, the highest grossing film of the series. Taking the script to CineTel Films and pitching himself as director, Englund got the gig, and from what I've heard, was intimately involved with every aspect of the production, from script rewrites and casting to even the marketing. Among his many contributions was getting Kevin Yagher, whom he was now friends with, to do the makeup effects, and because of his part in making New Line Cinema what it was by that point, he was able to get them to distribute the film. Most significantly for him personally, Englund met his wife, Nancy Booth, on the film, as she was the set decorator. However, I've read that the experience of making the film eventually turned sour for him, as CineTel released a severely cut down version into theaters without his knowledge. (The longer, uncut version, however, was released on video and later on Blu-Ray.) Despite having a budget of only around $2 million, 976-EVIL barely managed to bring in $3 million when it was released in the U.S. in March of 1989 (it first got released in the UK the previous December). But, when it hit home video, it proved successful enough that CineTel produced a sequel in 1992, which we will look at tomorrow.

Englund didn't return to direct the sequel. In fact, as a result of 976-EVIL's theatrical failure, his directing career quickly fizzled out. It's very much like what happened with Stan Winston and Pumpkinhead around that same time, as he wasn't able to parlay his main success as an effects artist into a secondary one as a director due to that movie's disappointing box-office. Other than a couple of episodes of the Freddy's Nightmares TV show, the only other movie Englund ever directed was a little known horror comedy from 2008 called Killer Pad (which, on the cover, proudly proclaims itself to be from the producer of Dude, Where's My Car?). It's a shame, too, because I can tell he was quite passionate about the film and was hurt when it failed. But, again, while I will agree that he knew where to put the camera and whatnot, I feel he really failed to make 976-EVIL really distinctive from the majority of other horror films released in the 80's.

Even though this was not long after Fright Night, Englund is said to have cast Stephen Geoffreys as Hoax based on his appearance in 1986's At Close Range, with Sean Penn and Christopher Walken. In any case, while certainly not Oscar-worthy, I think Geoffreys does a fair enough job as Hoax. He's kind of a male version of Carrie White crossed with Arnie Cunningham in Christine. He's a typical nerd, with his plaid sweater/shirt combo and pants, geeky hairdo, and effeminate voice (which I initially thought was a put-on for Evil Ed but, nope), and is constantly picked on by the thugs whom Spike often plays poker with. He also lives with his fanatically religious mother who, while not as horribly abusive as Carrie's mother, babies him and rules over his life with an iron fist. She especially doesn't approve of his relationship with Spike, whom she sees as a bad influence, but Hoax all but worships his cousin. He often uses this long vacuum tube connecting their bedrooms to send him notes and other items, and he also feels like he can depend on Spike to come to his aid when he's being bullied, which he does. And the two of them are planning to take a cross-country road-trip come summertime... if, Hoax adds, his mother will allow it, which all but means it's not happening. However, there is a hint of jealousy, in how Spike is a tough, good-looking, local "bad boy," who has no trouble getting lucky with women, i.e. everything that Hoax isn't and wishes he could be. Sure enough, he's really awkward with women, as he suggests to Suzie that she and a friend of hers join them on their trip, saying, "We'd certainly be more comfortable with a couple of babes ridin' on the back." And his mother's smothering of him has made Hoax sexually frustrated and, thus, a bit of perv, as he spies on Spike and Suzie having sex, then later sneaks into Spike's room and takes a pair of panties she left behind. 

While snooping around Spike's room, Hoax also finds the card advertising the 976-EVIL number and calls it just on a lark. Though he initially rolls his eyes at how corny and cliched the number's intro and recorded voices are, when it encourages him to, "Take in a late show, and meet the girl of your dreams," he decides to go for it. This leads to his running into Suzie after she's had a fight with Spike and the two of them go to the diner, where they have a nice time, eating some pizza. Unfortunately, it's ruined when Marcus and his thugs show up, pick on Hoax, as per

usual, and also take the pair of Suzie's panties that he, stupidly, had in his back-pocket. This enrages Suzie and she storms off, while two of the thugs put Hoax in a dumpster outside. Humiliated and emotionally broken, he calls the number again, and it tells him how to get back at those who've hurt him. However, the ritual he performs which he hopes will scare Suzie ends up causing her death, which horrifies him. And when he tries to tell Spike, his cousin becomes angry, first thinking it's a sick joke, and then when realizes it is true, with Hoax claiming he did it for Spike 

because she was hurting his "reputation." When he gets shoved to the floor, Hoax's resentment towards Spike boils to the surface. He tries to goad him into hitting him, and then threatens to one day turn the tables on him. Hoax also starts to show increasing aggravation with his mother's intrusiveness, and seethes when she takes away his phone, complaining about the phone bill he's charged up lately. And he begins to feel the effects of the number's satanic influence, and though initially frightened by it, when 

it gives him the ability to lash out at and seriously injure one of his bullies when they corner him in the restroom, he decides to embrace it fully. He calls the number again and asks to be given the power, then heads to the theater and wipes out Marcus and his gang, before returning home and killing his mother. By the climax, not only has Hoax fully become possessed and turned into a demon, but his house has become a literal portal to hell, and he intends to take both his principal, Angela Martinez, and Spike there with him.

Like I said, Geoffreys does give a pretty good performance, but here's the thing: I've seen this type of revenge of the nerd story a lot, in both horror movies and other genres, and it's been done better. While I can empathize with Hoax and understand why he goes down the road he does, because the story and the characters are underdeveloped, I don't connect with him the way I do with characters like Carrie White or Arnie Cunningham. And when Hoax becomes completely possessed and turns into a full-on demon, he's not all that impressive. He becomes

little more than a wise-cracking, supernatural slasher, in the vein of Freddy Krueger and Chucky, but doesn't have any really good one-liners or jokes while he's stalking and killing people. The only thing about him that I kind of smirk at is how flamboyant he gets during the climax, like when he has his hands on his hips and, when Spike and Marty arrive, he comments, "Just in time for my little... party." And some of the mugging he does, like the face he makes at Spike when he's asked, "Don't you think it's time we ended

this, Hoax?", is kind of funny. But I expected him to be much more hyper-kinetic, like he was as Evil Ed. Instead, he comes across as trying to be menacing, but with a tiny touch of exuberance and flamboyance. Maybe it's just my own personal expectations, but I was expecting this nerd to really let the beast out when he changed. Not to mention that this later phase of his performance clashes with how seriously the movie takes itself beforehand.

Hoax's gradual change from teenager to demon isn't that special to me, either. It's a gradual transformation, as he initially looks a little disheveled and rough, then starts growing these long wisps of hair, and his face becomes more angular and cracked. This is most notable in the scene where he kills the thugs, during which he wears some dark glasses but ditches them right before he kills Marcus. His voice also becomes more unnaturally deep as the possession goes on. And during the climax, he now has a demonic, completely cracked face, with longer wisps,

pointy ears, sharp teeth, and cat-like eyes. It kind of looks like an old-fashioned werewolf makeup (am I the only one who sees a little bit of Werewolf of London in there?), and I'll admit that it does look good in the blue lighting that dominates that sequence. But, like everything else with this movie, I've seen lots of much better monster makeup designs, so it doesn't do anything for me in the long run. And it also doesn't help that the big, clawed hands and feet that he grows are clearly rubber (although a shot where his claws grow before he attacks the bullies in the restroom and another where his foot bursts out of his shoe both look pretty good).

Englund is said to have hired Patrick O'Bryan as Spike because O'Bryan reminded him of a young Marlon Brando. I'm guessing he meant that in terms of looks and attitude, because even Brando's absolute worst performances are more interesting than what O'Bryan does. Spike is the typical teenage bad boy, with his leather jacket, Harley Davidson, and greased back hair tied in a small ponytail, who also happens to have a heart of gold. While he does like Hoax well enough, looking out for him and saving him from the bullies at one point, he's also annoyed by him, as he tends to pop up at the worst possible moments. Spike also doesn't get along with Lucy, who sees him as nothing but an evil sinner and a bad influence on her son, but unlike Hoax, Spike doesn't take her crap. He's the one who initially calls the 976-EVIL number, and it first goads him into simply taking the money he needs to pay off his gambling debt to Marcus. But later, he resists its temptation to simply steal some expensive leather bike gloves he comes across at an auto shop. That's when he learns that not doing what the number wants can potentially lead to death, as he's nearly run down by a driver-less car. But in the end, there really isn't that much to say about Spike, as O'Bryan's performance is really bland, without much emotion, and after he stops calling the number, his role becomes virtually superfluous. When he starts to see what's happening to Hoax, he has the same blank expression and monotone voice, and doesn't appear to really care about it. There is a brief moment when he goes to a church, seemingly hoping that he can find something to help Hoax, but he's turned away because the last service was hours ago, so it's pointless. Moreover, when he confronts Hoax, who's now completely possessed, at the end of the movie, Spike tries to get through to him by reminding him of that cross-country motorcycle trip they were supposed to take, but it doesn't resonate for me because there's so little emotion in his voice. And I didn't find him to be that tough either. He does beat up the aforementioned bullies, and kind of pushes and throws Hoax around when he finds out what he did to Suzie, but during the finale, he doesn't do anything that noteworthy, except shoot off a chunk of Hoax's face and defeat him by throwing him into a pit to hell.

Sandy Dennis, best known for having won an Oscar for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, plays Lucy, Hoax's overbearing, fanatically religious mother. Like Stephen Geoffreys, she does okay in her role, despite how stereotypical and over-the-top the character is. She won't let her son do anything, constantly babies and orders him around, not accepting any hint of insubordination on his or Spike's part, hates Spike because she thinks he's a sinner and a bad influence, and is always watching fire and brimstone evangelists on TV. She also has several, different-colored wigs, which she constantly switches back and forth. However, again going back to how we've seen this kind of thing before, Dennis' performance doesn't have anything on Piper Laurie as Carrie's mother (but then again, what does?). In fact, while Lucy does kind of abuse Hoax, occasionally smacking him and threatening to whip him with her leather strap, she mostly comes across as more annoying than loathsome. Not only is her overbearing, prejudiced personality and disrespect for anyone's privacy irritating to watch in and of itself, but so is the way she yammers on and on during her tirades (her Southern-style accent, speech pattern, and inflections, coupled with how she's constantly calling Hoax "boy," sometimes makes me think of Foghorn Leghorn!). And worst of all, while the aftermath is kind of sick, her actual onscreen death at the hands of her own son leaves a lot to be desired. 

Lezlie Deane, who would later appear in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, based on Englund's suggestion after working with her here (and who also has one of the creepiest, most awkward interviews I've ever seen in the documentary, Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy), is also fine as Spike's girlfriend, Suzie. Unlike in Freddy's Dead, which was just a few years later, she doesn't annoy me here, and I also find her to be kind of hot. But that said, she really doesn't have much to do in the short amount of screentime she has. Something of a tough biker girl, Suzie likes Spike enough to have sex with him (although Hoax messes it up by sending a crass note and causing Spike to blow too early; also, their doing it on that leather rocking chair did not look comfortable at all), but when he becomes more interested in winning back the money he lost at poker than taking her to a movie, she dumps him. She then runs into Hoax, whom she was initially put off by, as she realized he was watching her and Spike earlier, but because she's angry and wants to eat, she lets him take her to the diner. There, as she spends time with him, she does grow to like him, despite how awkward he can be, as well as how he's fascinated by things like spiders and daddy longlegs, which creep her out. However, their impromptu date is ruined when Marcus and his gang show up and, in their harassing Hoax, reveal that he's had a pair of panties she left in Spike's room in his back-pocket the whole time. With that, she angrily leaves, saying she thought he was different, and he later tries to scare her with a satanic ritual that ends up at her house. 

By far, the blandest characters are the private detective, Marty Palmer (Jim Metzler), and Angela Martinez, (Maria Rubell), the high school principal. Like most of the cast, both of the actors do their jobs fairly well, but they have crap all to work with. That's especially true of Marty, who comes out of nowhere early on, showing up at Hoax and Spike's home in order to talk with Lucy about the strange phenomena of fish falling from the sky the night before. He then trails Spike, managing to save him from getting run down when he refuses the number's demands of him,

but finds him unwilling to talk about what happened. So, he goes to the high school, where he talks with Angela about trying to speak with Spike again, and while he doesn't get the chance, he does find the advertisement for the number that Spike and Hoax used. He's able to trace it to its business address and meets the guy who runs the place, only to learn that the number has long since been disconnected. Incidentally, we never find out why Marty is investigating these incidents, or how he traced them to Garden City. And as for Angela, who doesn't make her first appearance until about halfway in, she inexplicably gets really close to him, to the point where she's assisting him in his investigation. After Marty learns of the number's satanic properties the hard way, when he receives a nasty shock from it at its business location, he and Angela head over to the Wilmoth home. There, they run afoul of the possessed Hoax, particularly Angela, whom he seems to have a thing for (in the theatrical version, there is no lead up to that at all). And in the end, the two of them can do nothing but attempt to escape the now literally hellish house, while Spike is the one who confronts and defeats Hoax.

Robert Picardo has a tiny role as Mark Dark, the man who runs the premium number business and created the 976-EVIL number. A rather sickly person, as he's often coughing and sniffling as if he has a really bad cold or allergies, he tells Marty that the number was an automated experiment to save on money that didn't work out, so he disconnected it two or three months before the start of the movie. He adds, "I guess nobody's interested in the underworld anymore, you know? Just, Ewoks and E.T., and football and phone sex. I hate that heavy breathing crap." But at the very end, you see him operating the number himself, talking in the creepy voice that was heard on the phone-line. Either he himself became possessed or has been the devil this whole time (it's hard to pick out but, if you look closely at him in some shots, you can see that his hair looks as though he has horns) but, regardless, it ends with him putting Hoax's photo in a folder full of images of past victims, as he prepares to claim another one (in Memphis, Tennessee, no less!). It's always nice to see Picardo, and he does what he can with this small role, but it's hardly one of his most memorable appearances.

The bullies are little more than a gang of generic thugs who pick on Hoax for no reason other than he's a nerd and bullies pick on nerds. Their leader, Marcus (J.J. Cohen), runs the projector at the local theater, where he also often holds poker games with his gang and Spike. He's the typical dickhead who orders the others to beat on and humiliate Hoax whenever they come across him, and is also seen taking a kid's lunch money early on, telling him that he can eat on Tuesday and Thursday, that he's doing him a favor, i.e. helping him to lose weight. He also acts all

outraged and disgusted when they find that Hoax has Suzie's panties, and tells the others to take care of him while he goes after Suzie when she storms out. In a deleted scene, he proves to be an even bigger scumbag than he already was, as he tries to rape Suzie while taking her home. As for the other punks, this one called Airhead (Gunther Jenson) sticks out because of how, twice in the movie, he yells, "Motherfucker!", in a hilariously ridiculous manner. What's more, he gets testy with Spike for mistakenly calling him "Skinhead," when that sounds like a much

better name than Airhead, don't you think? And Jeff (Darren E. Burrows) and Rags (Jim Thiebaud) are a pair who are always seen together, and often beat on Hoax as a pair, as well. They're only memorable because Rags tends is really good on a skateboard, while Jeff gets a really nasty face slash from Hoax's clawed, demonic hand in the restroom. (Also, for some reason, when Hoax walks in on their poker game during the third act, the two of them are in their drawers.) There's also this girl (Wendy J. Cooke) 

who sometimes hangs around with the gang, and who looks awfully young to be guzzling beer and doing a striptease for them (but, then again, considered Marcus' deleted attempted rape...). She's the only one who doesn't die a horrible death at Hoax's hands when he shows up at the theater during the third act. At least, I don't think she does. You never see what happens to her.

When I first did this review, I criticized Robert Englund's direction as being bland, saying he didn't do anything to make the movie look distinct from all the numerous low budget horror flicks that were released in the 80's. Now, while I still don't think this movie is anything amazing, I do feel I was a bit too harsh on that front and probably jaded from all of the other horror movies I've seen, because there are a number of memorable and downright surreal-looking scenes and setpieces here. In fact, the opening is a

prime example, starting with a guy running out of a building, backlit by a strong light from the interior, while the front has an eerie, green light on it. This is one of many instances of bright, vivid colors, akin to a Mario Bava or Dario Argento movie, such as in the inside of this store that the guy walks, which has a surreal pink and blue color scheme, while the rear section of the locker room, where Hoax and Spike have their confrontation about Suzie, is bathed in that otherworldly green color. Other scenes that are lit in a

distinctly colorful manner include Hoax in the phone booth when he calls the 976-EVIL number for the second time (light purple), Marty Palmer entering the room housing the phone-line late at night (deep red), the scene on the theater's rooftop (purple, due to the sign on its front), and the climax inside the house, after it's become a portal to hell (deep blue). And the interiors of Hoax and Spike's home have a notable warm, orange color scheme, while the nighttime exteriors on the streets tend to have a cold, bluish feel. 

Going back to the opening, Englund and his cinematographer, Paul Elliott, really do make it feel like a waking nightmare, combining the vivid colors with striking camera angles and imagery, like an off-kilter shot of a woman in that store offering the guy a phone, an overhead shot of him walking backwards down an alleyway, a shot of a ringing phone-booth at the end of the alleyway from between his legs, and a low-angle one on him from the front, as he walks towards the phone, again backlit by a bright light. 

The music score, sudden editing, and bizarre sound design of the phone ringing and the voices taunting him make it feel all the more freakish. Another noteworthy bit of camerawork is when Hoax takes the daddy longlegs he finds during his date with Suzie and puts it on the ground outside, only for a foot to come in and squish it. It then cuts to a shot of a close-up on the foot, then pans up to reveal Marcus and his gang looming above Hoax. Shortly afterward, during Hoax's plan to scare Suzie using a satanic ritual, 

there are overhead shots of the pentagram he's drawn on the floor of his room; a memorable one of him sitting shirtless in the middle of a circle of candles, rocking back and forth while enacting the ritual; and a close-up of Suzie's face when she drops dead, which Englund meant as a reference to the shot of Marion Crane's after she's been killed in Psycho. They also shoot Hoax in a nicely suggestive manner when he appears at the theater to get his revenge, keeping him in the shadows in the projection room's doorway when the bullies first see him. And when he's on his 

killing spree, there are some nice tilted angles on it, notably when he enters the restroom, where Marcus is hiding. This leads into what is probably the best bit of camerawork in the movie. When Hoax corners Marcus in the one stall, there's an overhead shot as he attacks, then the camera pans across the tops of the stalls until it comes to one in particular, as its toilet overflows with blood when you hear Hoax flush after killing Marcus.

Since there are a number of them throughout the country, I'm not sure which Garden City the movie is meant to take place in, but one thing's for sure: much of this place has gone to the dogs, with filthy, trash-littered streets, walls, both on the inside and out, of various buildings having graffiti sprayed all over them, and scummy people hanging around. After Dark Enterprises' place of residence is especially unpleasant-looking in all three respects, with the outside looking like a long abandoned warehouse, and

when Marty first goes inside, he sees some tacky rooms with people answering the various 976-numbers. Among them are a fat, drunk guy, sitting in a mostly unpainted, disheveled, and cluttered room, who's pretending to be Santa Claus for kids who call his number, and a heavyset, middle-aged woman who claims to be a, "Petite, seventeen-year old nymphet, with desires most men can't satisfy," while she sits in a room with lots of random pictures on the wall, along with a deflated blow-up doll, and holds what seems to

be an inflated condom (she makes a tongue gesture at Marty that prompts him to silently say, "I'm good,"). Mark Dark's office is similarly bizarre and cluttered, and the room housing the system that operates the 976-EVIL number is little more than a dusty, cobweb-filled closet. Other places, like the small diner, Dante's, initially look fine, if a little grubby, but then, you have the moment where Suzie is freaked out by a daddy longlegs crawling along the table (and yet, this seems to be the only place in town to get food, as everyone goes there). Similarly, while the high 

school may look idyllic on the outside, certain parts on the interior, particularly the men's restroom, which is disgusting and almost completely covered in graffiti (the "R + N" sprayed on one part of the wall was something Nancy Booth put there for Englund to find), tell a very different story. The theater, however, is about as bad-looking on the inside as you would expect, with a similarly grotesque restroom, and a projection room that's cluttered and you just know likely reeks of beer and cigarettes. The only thing 

about it that's appealing, at least to me, are the horror movie posters on the walls (though, was it really necessary to have Stephen Geoffreys framed in a shot with a Fright Night poster?). And Suzie's house is pretty modest-looking on the outside and isn't that bad-looking on the inside, for the most part, but it's still clear that she lives near the bottom of the social ladder. All of these settings fit with the vision that Englund had for the film, saying he wanted it to be, "Very American. A sort of remnant to Edward Hopper's world. A romanticized wrong side of the tracks. A place this is sort of funky, with a Zap Comix kind of charm."

Lucy's home is probably the most memorable setting, as it's an old-fashioned, two-story brick house, with a front lawn filled with hedges and lots of religious ornaments. The immediate interiors have a similarly old feel to them, with the living room containing some nice, antique-looking furniture, kept spotless, despite all of the cats that Lucy has crawling around, thanks to plastic coverings. It also has an organ behind the couch, with lots of lit candles sitting atop it, old paintings on the wall, and a TV that's almost 

always tuned to some televised evangelical sermon. The kitchen has something of a 1950's vibe, with the color scheme, the white-and-red tiles that make up the floor, and the old-looking refrigerator, housing bottles of milk that look like what you would expect to see a milkman deliver. Hoax's room looks a bit more average, although it feels like it hasn't changed much since he was a little kid, given some of the toys and clothes kept there. That said, he does have a telescope, which he, at one point, uses to spy on Spike

and Suzie (another nod to Fright Night), as well as a pet spider that he keeps in a container in his closet. There's also a vacuum tube that runs from his bedroom window and into Spike's room, which is completely separate from the main house and can only be reached by a set of exterior stairs (an obvious move by Lucy to keep him as far away from Hoax as she can). Spike's room is much more cluttered and full of junk than Hoax's, reflecting his bad boy persona. During the climax, the house becomes a literal portal to hell, but not in the way you'd expect.

Instead of flames, there's a lot of snow and ice (the latter of which looks a little fake in some shots), cold, blue lighting, some instances of satanic graffiti, and the living room floor opens to reveal an icy, bottomless pit. However, another portal, this one with more traditional flames, does open up below Marty and Angela while they're trying to escape near the end, and is where Hoax is flung into. It is all visually interesting, but nothing that spectacular.

After doing research, it's clear that Englund did very much have a vision for this movie, given what he said up above, as well as how he had it storyboarded and intended for it to come across as horror mixed with a film noir, with some comic book elements sprinkled in. And as I've said, the location work and art direction are quite well done. However, sometimes I feel the movie gets a little too on the nose in its use of allusions to the devil. Besides the phone number itself, which also tells you to dial "666" for your

horoscope, there's the diner being called Dante's, the movie theater El Diablo, Spike ordering some "deviled" eggs in one scene, and the use of the plant, Devil's Root. Also, while the set design is interesting and it's well shot, the idea that, during the climax, hell has literally frozen over, calling back to when that phrase was used earlier by Spike, makes me roll my eyes a bit.

I could be wrong but, even though the movie is most definitely set in the year it was released, I think Englund may have been going for a slight 50's vibe, given how Spike comes off a bit like a greaser, with his hairstyle, leather jacket, and Harley Davidson. Also, certain places, like Lucy's kitchen and the inside of Dante's, give me that vibe. But, again, make no mistake, this is very much an 80's movie, given some of the fashions and hairstyles, fads, like skateboarding, and especially in the case of the cental

gimmick of 976-numbers, which are now all but defunct. In fact, the extensive focus here on telephones in general, with payphones and different styles of phones that we see in a shop during one scene, also dates the movie the further we get away from that kind of technology. Admittedly, it's not fair to hold that up as a criticism, given how such things were all the rage at the time and thus, applying them to a horror movie seemed like a very unique, up-to-date concept. But still, nowadays, it's likely to negatively impact it, given how future generations 

aren't going to understand some of what it's referring to, especially the concept of premium-rate telephone numbers. It's the same thing that happens when movies nowadays blatantly incorporate anything that's currently popular; sooner or later, it's going to come off as dated, and that doesn't always come with a cool nostalgia factor.

But that's far from my biggest gripe. As I've already said, aside from the basic concept of a phone number that literally connects you with the devil, there's very little in 976-EVIL that hasn't been done numerous times before: an oft-beaten and abused nerd who gets his revenge through some dark power, an overly religious and smothering mother, a shithole of a town, the main character gradually becoming a monster, possession, portals to hell, and so on. In fact, Suzie's death being tied to her fear of spiders is akin to what 

was becoming a recurring theme with the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. And while it doesn't matter if you're entirely original, I do ask that you, at least, be entertaining, which I don't find this movie to be, either. It's fairly slow-paced, which I don't mind, but on top of that, I couldn't care less about what's going on due to the underdeveloped characters and bare bones story, especially in the theatrical version. Also, while it tales itself fairly seriously at first, it gets downright silly during the latter half, with Hoax's lame slasher villain puns and jokes, his demonic 

makeup, and the final scene, where Mark Dark is acting over-the-top and silly while operating the phone-line. Eating a hamburger while looking over a file, he gets some ketchup on a picture and comments, "Oh. Look what I went and did to you. Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk." And when the next caller says he's from Memphis, Mark gets excited and notes, "Oh, another mystery caller. They love me in Memphis. They love me in Memphis." And finally, as we'll get to in a bit, the movie doesn't build to a satisfying climax at all.

I said that the movie initially takes itself fairly seriously, but from the outset, there are moments that are hard not to smirk at. For one, the concept of a 976-number that can connect you to the devil is inherently silly. For another, while I would normally be intrigued to know just how that came about and if, as I said, Mark Dark is actually Satan or became possessed via his own creation, I find myself not caring here. The voice of the devil, which you hear over the phone and at the end of the movie (Robert

Englund himself, by the way), is overplayed and theatrical. I get it for the initial phone calls, as it's supposed to be a number with a cheesy gimmick, with him always giving the same opening spiel, "Welcome to the chasm of the unknown. I am the master of the dark, the guide to your destiny..." and rhyming horoscopes. But even when he's supposed to be more menacing, boasting about how Hoax's soul is now his, it's still hard to take seriously. I do kind of like the idea that, should you refuse to hold up your end and

do what the number "advises," this evil force will ensure that you die a horrible death, and that it always knows where you are, calling any nearby phone with a distinctive, distorted ring to let you know that you're in for it. But the first people we see fall victim to it are two randos we don't give a crap about. Also, their deaths, while definitely spectacular, with one getting electrocuted in a phone booth, set on fire, and blasted out of it, and another dying when a storefront window explodes in front of her, are more fun than horrifying 

(and aren't awesomely or painfully gory, either, as we'll get to). And finally, less than fifteen minutes in, it literally rains fish from the sky, which Lucy takes to be a blessing from God, given something she heard on TV, but Marty tells Angela that he's heard it's believed to be a warning of things to come. Either way, that imagery is more stupid than anything else.

One death scene that I do find effective, mostly because I can't stand spiders, is when Hoax, after being humiliated by the bullies and disowned by Suzie, decides to try to get his revenge. Receiving instructions about a certain ritual, he draws a large pentagram on the floor, lines it with candles, then places his pet spider in the center and squirts some juice from the Devil's Root plant onto it. He proceeds to sit in the middle of the pentagram, rocking and swaying back and forth, as disembodied voices speak

to him, telling him to, "Join us," as if it's suddenly The Evil Dead. This whole time, Suzie has been making herself some dinner at her house, putting a microwave dinner into the oven, then taking it out and placing it on her table. While she has her back turned, you see an arachnid leg poking out from under the tin-foil (God, I hate shit like that), as Hoax can be heard laughing. His laughing becomes more intense and maniacal as the scene goes on, and when Suzie eventually sits down to eat and removes the foil, numerous spiders go everywhere. Horrified at this,

she grabs a spray-can, but the spiders quickly get all over her and, either out of fear or because they're deadly venomous, she drops dead on the floor. Right at that moment, Hoax, knowing what's happening, wishes for it to stop, crushing his pet spider to try to make it. Realizing that Suzie is dead, he screams, "No!", at the top of his lungs, and heads over to Suzie's home, seeing that it is true.

I can also respect Englund's decision to go against expectations and not make the movie a full-on gorefest; at the same time, though, the lack of some awesome makeup effects is something else that makes it a bit of a slog. Even though Kevin Yagher had just signed on to do Child's Play at that point, because Englund was a close friend of his, he agreed to take on 976-EVIL at the same time. However, by his own admission, Yagher was only on set at the very beginning, and as the task of creating Chucky became

more and more complicated, he handed most of the effects work off to Bob Kurtzman and Howard Berger, who were working for him at the time. The first instance of makeup work is early on, when the woman who dies because of the number's wrath gets shards of glass in her face after the storefront window explodes in front of her. But after that, the next one isn't until Hoax badly slashes Jeff's face, and shortly afterward, we get a fair amount in rapid succession when he slaughters all of his bullies. After killing Jeff

and Rags offscreen, he comes at Marcus and Airhead with their still beating hearts in his hands (probably the coolest effect in the movie), then proceeds to pin Marcus' hand down with his foot and cut it off with his own knife. Hoax then impales Airhead on the theater's neon sign on the rooftop, before he corners Marcus in the restroom before killing him offscreen and causing that one toilet to overflow with blood. (Before he kills him, he taunts him by waving his own severed hand at him but, according to Yagher, even though he'd made this really good-looking fake

hand for the scene, due to a mix-up, a stiffer "stunt" hand ended up getting used, and it couldn't be reshot.) While Lucy's actual death isn't much to write home about, with nothing but a small splatter of blood on the wall, the aftermath, where you see her cats feeding on her corpse, is pretty disgusting. Thankfully, Hoax killing the parrot afterward is mostly alluded to as well. And finally, during the climax, Hoax himself gets a big section of his left cheek blasted off when Spike shoots him.

For a low budget movie, there's a fair amount of visual effects work here. Most of it is pretty obvious and archaic-looking, like the flames that blast at the screen when the first victim's burning body gets blown out of the phone booth, and when Hoax's body becomes enveloped in demonic energy when he fully submits to the number's evil. But one visual effect that's much less obvious is the exterior of the movie theater in the wide shots, with the marquee visible. Except for the doors and the ticket booth, that was all

a front-projected miniature, complete with small movie posters, and which, despite how much work it took to build and matte into the footage, was actually cheaper than finding a real location to shoot. The compositing of those shots of the portal to hell, in both Hoax's living room and outside, are a bit more obvious and haven't aged as well, but like a lot of these old-fashioned effects, there is a charm to them.

Getting back to Hoax slaughtering the bullies after he fully embraces the powers of Satan, that is the best sequence in the movie. He shows up at the door to the projection room, and Jeff and Rags take him outside to get revenge for what he did to Jeff at the school that day. (Though, this part is inter-cut with that pointless moment where Spike goes to the church, only to find it's closed.) They're gone for a while, when Hoax shows back up, without Jeff and Rags. Marcus demands to know where they are and Hoax

holds out their beating hearts, asking if he could enter the game, "With a pair of hearts." Horrified, Airhead literally picks up the girl, who was doing a striptease for them, and runs out of the room and up to the roof with her, while Marcus overturns the table and whips out a knife. He dares Hoax to give him his best shot, and Hoax proceeds to backhand him hard enough to send him flying across the room and against the wall. The vibration from the impact knocks over a bottle of cleaner on a nearby table, which is above a shelf of film reels. The liquid pours out of the bottle, and runs

over the table and onto the reels below, while Hoax puffs on a cigarette before flicking it, igniting the chemicals. Melodramatically going, "Oh, my," and then laughing at this, he spots Marcus crawling along the floor, going for his dropped knife. Hoax steps on his hand, with his toes bursting out of his shoe, as they became large, with long, black, claw-tipped nails. He then takes Marcus' knife and cuts his hand off, commenting, "Now, that's a dead man's hand," as he taunts Marcus with it. 

Instead of killing him right away, Hoax instead leaves the room and appears on the rooftop, right behind Airhead and the girl. Airhead whips out a chain and swings it around, yelling, "You're a dead motherfucker!" (that line was both poorly delivered and badly dubbed), but Hoax manages to easily disarm him, then grabs him by the neck and foot, lifts him up, and impales him on the theater's neon sign (a devil's pitchfork, no less). Hoax laughs as Airhead is electrocuted, shorting out the sign and the marquee, while the girl is last seen lying on the ground,

screaming. Meanwhile, Marcus, having bandaged his bloody stump of a hand, has taken refuge in the restroom. Going back to the projection room and finding him gone, Hoax easily tracks him down. Walking down the row of stalls, he throws them open one at a time, until he finds Marcus hiding in the last one. He waves his own severed hand at him, saying, "Bye, bye," then tosses it aside and comes at him with his knife, and that's when we get the pan across the stalls to the toilet overflowing with blood (incidentally, I have to say that J.J. Cohen knows how to scream in an unsettling manner; he really sounds like he's being tortured to death).

But, as I hinted at before, the actual climax is a big letdown. After Hoax kills his mother, Marty and Angela arrive at the house, with the former attempting to get inside. He climbs up to a second-story window via a trellis with Devil's Root around it, but gets knocked unconscious in a pathetic manner: Hoax appears at the window, startling him and causing him to fall (he hits the ground in a soft way that didn't look like it could knock anyone out). At that moment, Angela gets tired of waiting in the car and heads inside the house through the front door. That's when

she finds that the interior has become frozen and snowy, and she's drawn upstairs when she hears Hoax calling for her, saying his mother is ill. She walks up there, enters Lucy's bedroom, and finds her corpse lying in her bed, with her cats feeding on it. Horrified at this, she leaves the room, only to be grabbed and taken prisoner by Hoax. He forces her to remove her blouse, but that's as far as he goes, before he decides to take her one hand and lick her palm. He then shoves her back and she hits the wall, then slides 

down the stairs. He slowly walks down after her, while outside, Spike shows up and gets Marty to his feet. Much of the living room floor collapses to reveal the long drop down into a frozen chasm, and Angela tries to skirt along its edges, while also avoiding Hoax. Spike and Marty break their way inside through a window, just as Hoax nearly causes Angela to fall down the chasm. She ends up holding onto the edge, but Marty manages to help her, and while he 

gets her to safety, Spike confronts Hoax, pulling out a gun. Marty and Angela cross to the other side of the pit over a narrow section of the floor that's still standing, but Hoax sends a chandelier tumbling down towards them. It just barely misses them, but they manage to make it across and to the stairs. Spike then shoots, blowing off a chunk of Hoax's left cheek, but it barely fazes him. He takes away the gun, and when Spike punches him, he returns the hit and knocks him up against the wall. When he slumps to the floor, we 

get a callback to their locker room confrontation, which Hoax threatened to reverse the dynamics of. He tries to spit on Spike, as he did to him, only his loogie is a spark of energy that blasts a hole in the wall next to Spike's head. Then, Hoax hears Marty and Angela attempting to escape upstairs and smiles evilly.

They try to use the vacuum tube to make it over to Spike's part of the house, when Hoax appears at the window. He grabs the tube and starts shaking it, then uses his power to rip open a massive fissure in the ground below, with enormous flames billowing up through it. He continues shaking the tube, laughing and taunting them, and at one point yelling, "Burn, bitch, burn!" Spike enters the room behind him, but Hoax says that he's "growing weary" of him. And when Spike tells him to go to hell, he grabs him by the throat and slams him up against the wall. Spike 

tells him that they'll never be able to take that cross-country trip if he kills him, but Hoax says, "Once you've been to hell, everything else pales in comparison. And besides, Hoax, God rest his pathetic little soul, is no longer with us." Spike continues trying to reach Hoax, promising him the trip, and it seems to work, as Hoax's voice loses the demonic bass it's had since he accepted the power and returns to normal. But then, when he embraces Spike, his voice becomes that of the satanic phone voice. The

voice tells Spike that Hoax is his now, and Spike decides he has no choice but to kill his cousin. He charges towards the window and hurls Hoax through it. He falls into the pit to hell, which closes up afterward, while Marty and Angela manage to make it across to the other side to safety. And after that is the final scene with Mark Dark back at After Dark Enterprises' headquarters.

The music score was the work of two composers, Thomas Chase and Steve Rucker, both of whom have gone on to have an extensive career in doing music mostly for animated television and direct-to-video movies (fittingly, they also worked together on an episode of Freddy's Nightmares). That said, teir score for 976-EVIL is pretty low-key and not the most memorable batch of music. Honestly, save for some occasionally interesting instances of electronics and synthesizers, like what you hear during the opening and ending credits, and an atmospheric piece that plays when Angela walks into Lucy's kitchen and sees that it's been completely frozen over, along with the rest of the house, there's not much to say about it. The same goes for the songs on the soundtrack, although there's a funny story here about how CineTel Films screwed themselves out of having a hit song in the movie. Robert Englund was a fan of the band, Simply Red, and wanted to use their song, Holding Back The Years, in the movie, but the producers weren't willing to pay the $10,000 to get the rights. Then, the song became a major hit, but was now far too expensive to license, much to their dismay.

Though it was severely cut down when released in theaters, when 976-EVIL hit home video and laserdisc, it was in an extended version that was about thirteen minutes longer. However, when it was released on DVD, it was only the theatrical version, and it wasn't until it hit Blu-Ray (the first Blu release was in 2017, and then Eureka Entertainment put it out in the UK in 2020) that both versions were available for the first time. While I've still only seen the theatrical version, as I'm not going to spend a lot of money for a Blu-Ray of a film I'm not a big fan of, and the extended version is tough to find online to stream, I did look up the differences on sites like movie-censorship.com. For the most part, the material

that was removed from the theatrical cut is stuff that was completely superfluous, like longer shots, even by just a few seconds, and unnecessary lines. However, a few scenes were removed that I think could've helped the movie feel more coherent in the long run. Notably, the extended cut has more stuff with Marty Palmer investigating the case, like a longer version of the scene when he talks with Lucy, where she shows him the refrigerator full of the fish that fell from the sky (so much fish comes out, right at Marty, that he slips and falls); another where he learns who Spike is from Lucy, and also talks with Hoax about the fish, with Hoax saying he was the first

one to notice them, whereas Lucy said it was her; a different version of his conversation with Spike at the diner, where Marty is told that the house is actually Spike's and Lucy is just his legal guardian for the time being; and more moments between Marty and Angela, where he tells her about what's going on. While you still don't know why he's on this case to begin with, if nothing else, these scenes make Marty feel like more of a character than he is in the theatrical version. There's also some more material between Marty and Mark Dark, but it's mostly for laughs, as Mark gets a phone call in his office and immediately dismisses the angry caller on the line.

One scene in the extended version has Hoax entering Angela's office, telling him that he's nearly finished with what she asked of him. He awkwardly hangs around in her office, showing that he does have a thing for her, and adding some context to his devious interest in her during the climax. Hoax is also seen in Spike's room when he first arrives with Suzie, hiding some sort of map from him (the significance isn't really clear). Spike catches him up there and, though he finds his behavior suspicious, he lets Hoax have some money, noting that he's always broke. There's a bit more to Spike and Suzie's relationship, too, with Spike not remembering her name when they first meet up together. The only major scene that's still missing from the extended version is the attempted rape scene I mentioned earlier, which explains why Suzie looks really upset when she's trying to make herself some dinner.

At the end of the day, 976-EVIL is a movie whose biggest crime is how, for the most part, it's nothing special. On the plus side, it is visually impressive, with good direction by Robert Englund and memorable cinematography; the performances, particularly from Stephen Geoffreys, are mostly decent; the locations and sets are also memorable in how they're mostly very rundown and disgusting, while the climax in the house has a nice look about it with the ice, snow, and blue lighting; there are some good scenes here and there; and an occasional nice makeup and visual effect. But, the story and characters are underdeveloped, some of the acting is just plain bad, the core concept is both dated and inherently silly, the movie tends to get more and more ludicrous as it goes on, the makeup effects work is rather disappointing, both in terms of quantity and quality, especially given that it's Kevin Yagher, the music score is ho-hum, the climax is very disappointing, and, most of all, if you've seen a lot of 80's horror movies, or horror movies in general, there's little here that hasn't been done elsewhere and better. Even though it got a sequel, it's very obscure to all but the most die-hard horror fans to this day. If you're one of its fans, power to you, and it's not awful at all. But, to me, there are numerous horror movies from the 80's that I would much rather watch.