New Year's Evil is a 1980 American slasher film written and directed by Emmett Alston, co-written by Leonard Neubauer, and starring Kip Niven, Roz Kelly, and Chris Wallace. The plot follows a Los Angelespunk rock and new wave show host who receives a series of phone calls during a televised New Year's Eve bash from a killer warning of impending murders that he plans to exact as the New Year dawns on each time zone.
Plot
As the film begins New Year's Eve is on its way and television's most famous punk rock lady icon, Diane Sullivan, is holding a late-night countdown celebration of music and partying, televised live from a Hollywood hotel. All is going well until Diane receives a phone call from an odd-sounding stranger claiming his name is Evil, who announces on live television that when the clock strikes midnight in each time zone, a "Naughty Girl" will be "punished", then the killer signs off with a threat claiming that Diane will be the last Naughty Girl to be punished. The studio crew takes safety measures and heightens security but a string of murders occur across Los Angeles at each stroke of midnight across each time zone. The killer records his victims as he murders them and calls back the station each time, playing the tapes back to prove that he is serious. Diane's son Derek arrives but is mostly ignored by his mother, causing him to start behaving very erratically due to Diane's lack of interest in his life. There are many suspects as to who the mysterious killer and caller is: a crazed fan, a religious psychotic or maybe it is someone much closer to Diane than anyone could have ever expected. Evil eventually infiltrates Diane's party and upon confronting her is revealed to be Diane's husband Richard who was previously thought to be too busy to attend. Richard reveals his motivation to be a similar feeling of neglect and anger of Diane's and other women's treatment of him. He gets caught by security trying to kill Diane and flees from the scene. He races toward the rooftop where he commits suicide by jumping. Diane is loaded into an ambulance while Derek is seen wearing the killer's old mask in the ambulance with the corpse of the medic at the front.
The song "New Year's Evil", written by Roxanne Seeman and Eddie del Barrio, is performed on-camera by the Seattle rock band Shadow, who appear as a punk rock band in the film playing the song at the opening of the movie and repeatedly throughout. The recorded studio version also appears in the film. This version was pressed as a 7" vinyl45 rpm single. Promotional singles were sent to radio stations throughout the US. A full soundtrack record is announced in the closing credits of the film, but has not materialized. W. Michael Lewis and Laurin Rinder composed the film soundtrack and produced the title track's recording.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, New Year's Evil has an approval rating of 14%, based on seven reviews. On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 33 out of 100, based on 4 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a 1½ and wrote, "New Year's Evil is an endangered species - a plain, old-fashioned, gory thriller. It is not very good. It is sometimes unpleasantly bloody. The plot is dumb and the twist at the end has been borrowed from hundreds if not thousands of other movies. But as thrillers go these days, New Year's Evil is a throwback to an older and simpler tradition, one that flourished way back in the dimly remembered past, before 1978". Gene Siskel gave the film zero stars out of four, calling it "a hideously ugly motion picture". Variety wrote, "The true horror of New Year's Evil is the endless musical numbers by punk rockers and shots of their dancing fans. Amongst that, the bloody killings seem a welcome relief." Among retrospective reviews, Eric Vespe of Ain't It Cool News said, "New Year's Evil falls into that 'didn't love it, didn't hate it' gray area of mediocrity that doesn’t exactly inspire any kind of passion one way or the other. On the one hand it's too goofy and amateurish to really be creeped out by and on the other it's not fun enough to rally behind". Dread Central's Matt Serafini concluded, "This isn't worth your time if you're looking for a horror film to deliver in scares or suspense, but as a late night horror fix, it's ideal. What New Year's Evil lacks in scares it makes up for in pure entertainment. And really, that's all you can ask for". The film was labeled "another routine mad-slasher film" and a "strictly paint-by-numbers effort" by TV Guide.
