User reviews

When this movie debuted, it must have caused a few eyebrows to raise. After all, early on in the movie a high school girl is kidnapped and raped by her classmates. While it IS handled very tastefully and discretely, this was hot stuff for the time. Sadly, after she is found on the side of the road by the police, her foster parents refuse to allow her home...as if SHE was somehow at fault. So, she's sent to live at a girls school. The film then cuts to her release. Dixie (Lisa Gaye) is vulnerable and some sleazebags realize it and take advantage of her. Eventually, you see he becoming a stripper and even ends up marrying a guy who's an armed robber and kidnapper!! By the end of the film, she's at the end of her ropes. Such a sad end for a nice girl who just didn't get any breaks.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this film to some will be seeing William Campbell (of "Star Trek" fame) playing a sleazy boyfriend of Dixie in the picture. He's very charming and sweet...and a rat down deep! Other than this, the film isn't bad...but it's not at all good, either. Sort of a super-cheap rags to riches to rags morality tale.

I will not tell the film, as most do here on IMDb, writing a review does not mean relating the action of the film in your own words, I have written this several times, writing a review means expressing a critical opinion about the film, that's all. So, this "Night of Evil" it's a mediocre production about the drama of a young woman played honorably by Lisa Gaye. The rest of the cast is OK. The story is trivial and very predictable. I also saw Lisa Gaye in "Face of Terror" (1962), a much better film than this one, she was a very good actress, who deserved to act on much better screenplays. And to be directed by first-rate directors.

Someone had the brilliant idea of casting Lisa Gaye as a 26-year-old high school cheerleader named Dixie Ann Dikes. Make up your own jokes.

In the opening, Dixie is assaulted by the high school football star. Since her foster parents want nothing to do with her, she is sent to a "school for girls," but ends up as a roomie to Linda, an "alumna" of the school. Linda takes Dixie to meet her boss, who immediately decides that she should enter the Miss Colorado Beauty Contest. This makes perfect sense, since the movie was shot in Indiana.

Dixie wins the contest, becomes an instant celebrity, and meets Chuck (William Campbell). After a week together, they decide to get married. But this poses a problem for Dixie. Contestants in beauty contests are not allowed to be married, so the marriage is kept a secret. Another issue is that Chuck is a crook, but Dixie is too dumb to realize how her husband makes his money. He is supposed to be an escaped convict, yet he just comes and goes as he pleases, has a boat, swimming pool ... what the hell is this?

Things go downhill quickly, and that's just in the audience. After Chuck's plan at a kidnapping goes awry, Dixie finds out the truth. Somehow she becomes a blonde and ends up working in a seedy joint, where she is promptly slugged by a scumbag. When she recovers, she needs $40 in rent money. Her landlady looks her up and down and suggests she could probably make that amount in two hours. That's the only believable line in the film.

Dixie buys a gun, considers offing herself, then robs a drugstore instead. The courtroom finale is not to be believed.

I've seen Gaye in several movies, and her widow's peak has always bothered me. Here, she still has it, but in several scenes, it's barely noticeable, so that's a break. And she looks good in a bathing suit. Campbell is as repulsive as ever. He barks at one of his gang: "You keep your mouth shut and do what you're told or I'll cut your liver out." Personally, I would have liked to have seen that.

The rest of the cast is played by justifiably unknowns, like Sammy Mannis, who croons the equally unknown "Don't Ever Change."

The film is narrated by columnist Earl Wilson, who is saddled with crappy lines like this while describing Dixie: "The fears were gone now and so was the hurt, and there was a happy sense of belonging in the world. But yet, she still couldn't help but feel that she had been amputated somewhere."

The paying customers probably felt the same way.