Luzifer

In the spring of 1981, an acquaintance of a first year film student took a Super 8 movie camera to a rural community and asked people on the spot to pretend that they're in a creepy, demonic horror movie. No...That's not actually what happened, but it may as well have been. Director-writer-composer-actor LaLoggia (and the guy is no Clint Eastwood or even Kevin Costner!) cooked up this cheap-looking, over-ambitious, pretentious, badly written and acted, illogical, senseless mess. There are two prologues to the film. One is a fairly creepy, but ultimately silly battle between a priest and Lucifer. The second is a godawful christening with ludicrous effects and acting. Years later, Arngrim (scary for all the wrong reasons) is a (26-year-old) high school student. He's an effeminate, brilliant outcast who alternates between haughty arrogance and quivering fear. (The performance as seen makes no sense at all.) His high school (full of mid-twenties bad actors) is a template for idiocy. Students mouth off to an inane degree, smoke pot on the grounds, sneak off to boiler rooms for sex and blare music from their convertibles (does anyone in the film have a hard top car?) Chief offender Eden plays a Vinnie Barbarino wannabee with gapped teeth and jeans that give too much away. He slaps his girlfriend and picks on Arngrim. However, the best scene in the film comes when he taunts Arngrim sexually in the locker room shower to impress his friends. He finds himself in a violent liplock he can't break away from. (One thing the film has going for it is a dose of male nudity, some of it frontal.) Meanwhile, Hoffman (who thinks she's in a good movie....she's wrong) is an archangel reincarnated who is bent on destroying Arngrim. She teams with another of her kind, young Rowe McAllen (in a comatose performance that dictated that she would never again appear in a feature film.) Rowe McAllen deservedly joins the legion of other film actors who got billed as, "Introducing..." and were scarcely heard from again. It all comes down to a battle between good and evil which happens to occur on the night of a big, tacky play about the crucifixion of Jesus. These final scenes are interesting only because the action in them breaks the tedium of the previous hour. Some of the make-up is effective and a few moments are funny (intentionally?? A guy say to his girlfriend, "You know I wouldn't let another creep put his hands on you" just as a zombiefied hand reaches for her ankle.) However, like the rest of the film, the lighting, acting, effects, and direction are all horrible. The video box spends half it's copy touting the soundtrack....not a good sign that the film itself will be an good. The songs are cleverly used, but hard to hear at times and only used in snippets mostly. Camp highlight: A militant gym teacher bellows and screams his head off inappropriately and eventually kills a student with a dodge ball!!!! Hilarious.

Young high school misfit discovers he is the antichrist and gets revenge on his cruel classmates while fighting off two arch angels in human form. Good premise is well plotted, but some over the top acting, laughable special effects, and a disappointing finale ruin it. Good soundtrack though. Rated R; Graphic Nudity, Adult Themes, Violence, and Profanity.

FEAR NO EVIL was the first movie directed by Frank LaLoggia, who was in his early 20s when he made it. This alone should be reason enough to overlook the film's many faults, certainly when you consider that the story is ambitious, to say the least. And because of this, I actually give props to the film because it's not the all-out disaster everyone says it is. For a first film, it's at times surprisingly good. But the story and direction are, nonetheless, extremely murky. Some scenes are dreadful, like the shot of the front of the house which shows the passage of time and we see the house getting more dilapidated by the second. When the scene ends, the house looks like a tornado hit it but when we see inside the house, everything looks fine. Huh?!?! Moments like these, plus the unknown cast, who at times look like they're acting in a high school theater production, don't help much to create a solid, focused production. The ending was good but you saw it coming a mile away.

I don't understand why this movie is so despised. It's probably due to the shower scene. Fan boys can't take moments like this, which are, oddly enough for a horror movie, too shocking for them. Oh the irony!

In the end, FEAR NO EVIL is an adequate first movie made in the early 1980s. Like I already said above, it's not the worst horror movie ever made like so many have claimed it to be (see PLEDGE NIGHT!). But the director's ambitions exceeded his inexperience and the film's low budget.

Angels Mikhail, Gabrielle and Rafael form a holy trinity living on Earth to defeat Satan, which they do as the film begins. Of course, he is born again in the 60s and, by the time 1981 rolls around, the Antichrist is a powerful handsome devil. Nah, just kidding. He is an Ian Curtis look-a-like high school geek named Andrew (Stefan Arngrim) who is looking to resurrect his army of the dead in order to rule the world or something. Of course, the reincarnated Angels are here to stop him with their glowing beams of light.

I'm not really sure where I fall on FEAR NO EVIL. It is definitely ambitious for a low budget feature and falls into the M.S.U. (Makin' Stuff Up) genre perfectly. It is almost like director Frank LaLoggia had two half finished scripts and threw them together. I would recommend it just for the dodge-ball bit (watch the hyped up coach) and the bizarre scene at the end where the film's big bully gets his comeuppance by growing boobs. WTF??? The high school scenes are really funny, like LaLoggia had no sense at all how people behaved in school. One surprising thing is the soundtrack which features The Ramones, Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Boomtown Rats and Talking Heads. I guess back then music rights weren't outrageous like they are today.

As far as horror movies go, this one is above average (definitely not warranting less than four). Yeah, there were some drawbacks. Some scenes were a bit drawn out and others were completely irrelevant. What was up with that homoerotic male shower? That was over the top and pretty much as gratuitous as most female shower scenes. Lucifer's character shows flashes, but never really seems inherently evil as you would think. It's clear that he knows who he is from the start, but the role is written as if he's going through the puberty of devilhood. If Julie/Gabriel had been required to be nude, I would have given this a 10. Sadly, her clothes stayed on. The gym teacher overacts with a hilarity of epic proportions.