Fear No Evil

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.

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.

Fear No Evil is a hard movie to review, because there are 3 completely different movies fighting for the spotlight for a little over 90 minutes. Some aspects of each work by themselves, but they never come together in any cohesive way. We have your typical Omen-esque/ "Oh, no! My son is the devil!" movie mixed with a talky, exposition-heavy subplot about the archangel Michael who has been reincarnated in the body of an old woman, and it's all topped off with some early 80's high school hijinx.

The movie might be confused, the pacing might be almost non-existent at times and feel like you're channel surfing through three different movies, but there are some images here that, once seen, you'll never forget. There's the bizarre, homoerotic gym shower scene, a deadly game of dodgeball, a christening that turns into a blood bath, a woman-hating school bully growing breasts, zombies emerging from the grave and terrorizing attendees of a passion play, and a reenactment of Jesus' crucifixion that turns a little too realistic. There's so much to love and remember about this movie that it keeps it from being a total waste of time.

With a few more drafts of the script, perhaps Fear No Evil could have really been one of the better Omen/Carrie rip offs. The writer/director went on to do the wonderful, thoughtful Lady in White, so I think it was a case of typical first film issues.

I can't believe I've never heard of this before. Got it at the comic book show today. I'm remind of a better satanic school kid movie called 'Evilspeak'. Get that one if you can, but if you wind up with 'Fear no Evil' you will be entertained and surprised. During a showing of a Passion Play the crowd begins to bleed. Yes, there is quite a bit of religious matter in this movie. Angels in human form versus the devil. That is not all though. There are high school teens up to their 80's activities (having sex). Also, naked boys for an odd scene with a violent kiss. This movie is more homoerotic than 'Jeepers Creepers 2'! In the final scene you can see the devil boy's genitals if you pay close attention. I don't know why!?! Then, there are light shows and I expected the beams to come out of the screen in 3-D! Punk soundtrack with the Rezillos, Sex Pistols, Ramones, and Talking Heads.

I remember a friend taping this for from a TV movie channel back when I was too young to watch these type of flicks (must have been at age 11). Anybody else of you who first saw it at that age, must know "Fear No Evil" tends to stick in your memory. In 2007 I managed to pick up the US Anchor Bay DVD edition and re-watch it. It will always remain very much a flawed affair all the same, but it's a guaranteed fun watch. You'll just have to be able to handle 80's horror cheese. A whole lot of it. "Fear No Evil" is a pretty ambitious movie (and the same goes for the story and the orchestrated score). Some tension, sometimes frightening, sometimes shocking but safe to say that most of the time it doesn't make a lick bit of sense. Unbelievable how many songs by 80's bands they managed to put on the soundtrack (great stuff like The Ramones, Talking Heads, Sex Pistols,...). So what do we have here? We've got the Devil incarnated, naked breasts (obviously), angels and demons at play, zombies, some weed-smoking, basket balls that crush & kill, (and for the ladies) we got an all-boys showering scene with all the dudes generously flapping around their ding-dongs (and some male/male kissing with almost deadly consequences). Not nuts enough yet? We also got a solid on-screen hint at female masturbation with a gun. More? How about immensely enjoyable make-up effects & some highly psychedelic, colorful animated effects... 80's Horror rocked, simple as that.