I like to explore the current landscape of horror in these marathons, but it almost always pays off to look back to the eighties for its unique brand of impolitic zaniness.
His brother, Ron, is by any metric more famous and successful, but Clint Howard is a still a national treasure. His contributions to the horror and horny teen comedy genres are innumerable, but they typically come in the form of quirky-looking and acting side characters (my favorite is The Wraith, a surefire future 31 for 31 entry.) In 1981, however, the nation was treated to Clint Howard, leading man, in the horror revenge tale Evilspeak. It also has some comedy thrown in, and some horniness now that I think about it, so pretty much all bases covered. The plot involves Howard attending a military academy with a bunch of other 30-year-old “teenagers” who bully him mercilessly. Howard is bullied by his peers for being lousy at soccer, for being an orphan, and primarily for being the human manifestation of Theodore Chipmunk. He isn’t safe from the faculty, either, as they fail to punish his tormentors and instead give him extra chores for the various impacts the bullying has on his punctuality and appearance. The tables turn, however, once Howard discovers an ancient black magic tome that he uses to cast spells by hacking one of the school’s computers. The eighties, ladies and gentlemen!
The first two acts of Evilspeak are, candidly, a little slow. They also suggest the type of movie where Howard scores the winning goal in the big soccer game and gets revenge on his bullies by putting laxatives in their scrambled eggs or something. There are horror elements, of course, a couple of early deaths and an opening sequence involving human sacrifice set in 16th century Spain, but the time is mostly spent on the school-day hijinks of the academy. Which is fine, but I’ve seen it done a million times before and I’ve seen it done significantly better. For example, the bully crew are constantly calling Howard “Cooperdick”, a take on the character’s real last name, Coopersmith. That does admittedly sound like the type of lazy insult that these buffoons might come up with, but the writers of the script couldn’t do better? They got to decide Coopersmith’s name, they could have started with a better pun and worked backwards. All that said, Clint does makes an inherently sympathetic, if dopey, protagonist and I enjoyed his interactions with school chef, Lenny Montana (The Godfather‘s Luca Brasi!) To say that things pick up in the third act, however, is an understatement.
As soon as I saw Clint Howard, covered in blood and with hair disheveled into his trademark vertical poof, levitating across a burning chapel with a giant sword in his hand, I remembered why I enjoy revisiting minor horror movies of this era. He then proceeds to use that sword to smash through a teacher’s head, and the Carrie-like cycle of vengeance kicks off in earnest. Head smashing and decapitation were a common tool for these type of movies at the time, but typically reserved for one special kill to really put some stank on it, so to speak. I have never seen them used as liberally as they are in Evilspeak, basically the default method for dispatching of victims, and I can tell you that the effort was greatly appreciated. The back-up method, for anyone interested, is dismemberment by a pack of pigs that happen to be possessed by Satan. So, not too shabby.
I had so much fun with the end of this movie that it made the whole thing a worthwhile investment of time for me. If you are my age (mid-forties), and my description doesn’t make you roll your eyes, then I would recommend checking this one out. If you are younger, and you don’t have that early eighties bizarreness as a reference point, you may find it a tougher watch. Not a full-throated recommendation, in other words, but probably hits the sweet spot for some of you sickos out there. It’s streaming on Shudder, or there’s an edited version on Youtube if you don’t have access to Shudder and don’t mind missing out on some of the good stuff (you should mind.)
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