Prime Evil

I watched this as one of the movies in Rhino's Horrible Horrors Vol. 1 box set. While it wasn't entirely horrible, it was pretty poor.

It starts off with some narration (which is absent for the rest of the movie), and a scene of a monk turning Satanist in the 1300s or something like that. Then in the present day, the death of a priest who was secretly a Satanist prompts a nun to go undercover to try to infiltrate the Satanists. She isn't given much to do for most of the movie, though.

There's a young woman who had been abused by her father and a group of child pornographers who plans to get married. Apart from the sexual abuse as a child, she's never had sex. Her grandfather is one of the Satanists and plans to use her in a sacrifice. He would like to take over the group.

There's also the Satanist's goon, who goes about like a slasher killing some people, abducting others. The cinematography and editing and so on aren't incompetent, but the acting and story are pretty lifeless. Surprisingly, there's no nudity. There's not a whole lot of blood, but there is some, and towards the end some people rapidly age or melt, I'm not sure.

The idea of murdering satanic Catholic monks totally turned me on, but what I saw here is just horrible crap! I'm a die hard horror fan, and I go out on a limb to make even the WORST horror films good, but this film was so BAD that I just wanted to kill myself after it was all over! This film is truly horribly boring and poorly acted and pinpoints exactly where low budget horror goes wrong.

*out of****pretty bad low average bore

"Prime Evil" came in a boxed set of bad "b" movies. The hope was that it would be at minimum watchable. It met those expectations. The plot was complicated enough, and the format was such that it succeeded in building suspense. This is a horror movie without too much horror, and it is presented without any gratuitous violence. I liked the tale told from a feminine perspective. The reality is that, similar to "Rosemary's Baby", it is a tale that could actually be. That perhaps is where the horror creeps in, in retrospect. The cast was decent and had skills beyond that of your typical bad "b" film. Was I glad I watched it? Yes. Would I watch it again? Probably.

I'm somewhat surprised by the bad reviews here; only in that I would GUESS someone who took the time to WATCH "Prime Evil" might well LIKE "Prime Evil." But there you go.

I think the film is somewhat better than that. Findley's film is clearly meant to be absurd and is mostly played for laughs. A good portion, if not all, of the silly humor works. William Beckwith is certainly game as a the head bad guy, and Christine Moore is a winning presence who helps you hang in there to the end.

Therein lies the problem, the film wears out it's welcome by about half an hour, and the comic cops who bring up the rear are more tiresome than amusing. Maybe Findley though She needed a lot of padding between the knockers and stage blood, but the film overplays it's hand.

Again, a lot of this plays like a parody of the devil worshiping cult film that goes way back to "The Black Cat", and if your into this kind of stuff at all you might enjoy "Prime Evil."

Okay, so we've got Roberta Findlay ("Tenement: Game of Survival", "Snuff") directing a cheesy 80's horror movie revolving on a brotherhood of devilish monks sacrificing young women to Satan himself and drinking their blood in order to remain immortal. How bad could this possibly be? Correction; it's unquestionably going to be extremely bad, but the right question to ask should be: How is this not going to be entertaining? What we have here is pure late-80's trash-gold, with a completely nonsensical and laughably incoherent plot, tacky make-up effects, gratuitous nudity and a whole lot of gibberish about Our Lord Satan! The script of "Prime Evil" is wonderfully incompetent and aimlessly skips from one theme onto the other without any form of continuity. The film opens in the year thirteen-hundred-forty something with a bunch of monks turning to Satanism because they're angry with God for allowing the Black Plague to kill millions of people. This was obviously a brilliant career move because the story suddenly jumps forward in time 600 years and all the monks contained their same age and virility. But the next winter sacrifice is coming up and one of the cult members suggests using his granddaughter because she's still a virgin. Meanwhile, the leader of the cult engaged a convicted killer to randomly kidnap the granddaughter's best friends and then – finally – there's also a sub plot about a devoted nun going undercover in the cult by order of the Catholic Church. This last sub plot is actually the most hilarious, since Sister Angela is hardly ever mentioned anymore after her initiation rites. This is why I personally love 80's horror movies! There are so many ideas yet they all just loosely connect together. There's no atmosphere of suspense whatsoever and even the whole devil-worshiping concept seems redundant. They're just a posse of bloodthirsty priests craving to cut open voluptuous young girls. There's fairly little gore until the climax arrives and that reddish puppet with horns, supposedly representing Lucifer, is just plain pitiable. The acting performances are horrible, but I don't suppose you expected it any other way. Boring, however, it was not.