The more of them I watch, the more I'm convinced all movies from 1988-1992 need to be fired directly into the sun. There is a chance, however small, that some day an alien race will land on Earth and judge our right to exist based on our contribution to the arts, and if they choose that time period to examine, we are completely and helplessly screwed.
Some great movies came out of that timespan, but I'm afraid they're going to have to be sacrificed for the greater good. The vast majority of them--even the ones that are made more entertaining by their flaws, like 1989's 976-EVIL--are too ugly, tacky, and sleazy to risk keeping around.
Stephen Geoffreys wants to be cool and strong like his cousin Patrick O'Bryan, but instead he's a beat-up wimp who all the girls laugh at. His fortunes change, however, after he discovers a demonic phone line that gives him terrible powers.
That's the condensed way of saying "lots and lots of time is spent watching teenagers do what was once, to the horror of the modern eye, considered cool." Some of their activities, like gambling, smoking, and getting it on, are timeless. Others, like their obsession with obscene graffiti and styling their hair with such moronic fetishism it's a wonder they had time to feed themselves, are so specific to their time and place the movie may as well have been "1989!!" flashed for ninety straight minutes.
We're talking cheese with a capital cheddar. It's so cheesy you'll need a machete and a burlap sack of tortilla chips just to wade through it.
But director Robert Englund (that's Freddy Krueger, son!) delivers some pretty funny deaths. And Geoffreys' acting is kinda good, making it extra confusing he'd moved on to porn two years later. (His filmography reads like something straight out of Clerks.) Most bizarrely of all, it was cowritten by Brian Helgeland, who won an Oscar for the script to L.A. Confidential.
That is one freakish pedigree. 976-EVIL is like the Bad News Bears of horror movies, a ragtag collection of talent that ends up much better than it has any right to be--not good, but a good time.
This one was suggested to me by a reader. I'm grateful for the helping hand. So many movies get made a lot of them fall right off the social radar, never to be heard from again. Without getting pointed in the right direction, I might have missed 976-EVIL's ageless message: bully a nerd, and you'll end up slashed to ribbons by a scaly lizard-elf.