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Released by: VCI Entertainment
Released on: November 30, 2004.
Director: Roger Evans
Cast: Red Mitchell, Tracey Huffman, Charles Trotter
Year: 1987
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The Movie:
You've got to love the homemade horror movie boom of the eighties and all the lunacy that came with it during those golden years. As VCRs became common place and video stores needed materials as quickly as they could get it and often times the movie didn't have to be good - it just had to have a cool cover. Case in point? Forever Evil, made in 1987 by director Roger Evans and written by Freeman Williams.
When the film begins a woman pays a visit to a spiritualist named Ben Magnus (writer Williams) who reads the Tarot for her and soon learns that she is to be paid a visit by… DEATH! The only problem is, he got it all wrong - the cards were talking to him, something he learns when a giant Jawa with glowing red eyes shows up… shortly after some sort of unseen force zooms towards the woman and whisks her off, Evil Dead style.
From here the movie shifts gears and introduces us to a man named Marc (Red Mitchell) and Holly (Diane Johnson). Marc likes blue and yellow stripes and scarves and Holly (Diane Johnson) is pregnant but isn't showing. They're about to sell the old family cabin that sits on some choice lakefront property in Texas to a real estate agent but want to have one last shindig before getting rid of the place. They invite two other couples to join them, and one of the ladies professes that the only reason she stays with her boyfriend is because of the oral sex. They head inside, play poker, make strange noises and awkward glances for a while and then Marc notices that Holly is missing. They search the home and find her naked and dead in the shower, her stomach cut open and the baby that didn't ever appear to be in her stomach completely missing. From there, something evil kills everybody except Marc, who puzzlingly escapes from the chaos only to stand in the middle of the road where he's promptly run over by somebody that we never see again.
With that out of the way, Marc makes it out of the hospital and then somehow joins up with a woman named Reggie (Tracey Huffman) and the cop investigating the murder, Leo (Charles Trotter), who describes the crime scene as being nasty enough to make Manson puke and who has the uncanny ability to recognize war veterans on sight. Thankfully, before the night of horrors that took his wife, Marc had successfully finished his invention, the Emergency Grappling System. He demonstrates this device, which wraps around your wrist and fires a spike on a cable, to Reggie by spearing and reeling in a log. At some point, this may or may not come in handy. Eventually our three heroes start investigating things and wind up at the house where the Tarot card reader from the opening scene lived. Here they find evidence of some cult member types trying to bring their dark god, Yog Kothag, back from the part of space he was banished to once upon a time. Somehow this ties in to the murders and our intrepid if unlikely trio soon find they are dealing with an otherworldly evil far more powerful than they could ever imagine…
Recommended to fans of micro-budget oddities like The Basement, Sledgehammer and Things, this movie is way too long and horribly paced to be of interest to the mainstream. With that said, it has an almost hypnotic quality to it that makes it completely watchable should you find yourself in the right frame of mind. Despite the fact that it's almost two hours long in its director's cut (and only eight minutes shorter in the 'home video premier' version also included with this release), the film frequently loses focus and spends plenty of time on aspects of the script that go absolutely nowhere. It's trance inducing in that strange bottom of the barrel sort of way and as it throws logic out the window (Really? Marc isn't the least bit upset that wife and unborn child are slaughtered… he can instead fall for Reggie a day or two later?), we have no choice but to invest the time and energy to stick with it. You know where the picture is going early on as the unusually long and horribly rendered computer generated credits lull us into a comatose state, and from there it somehow gets better and worse at the same time. Where are the cultists that everyone is talking about? Why do they want to bring Yog Kothag back from space? How did he get stuck in space in the first place? How the Hell did Marc just rip that axe off the wall so easily? How many times are they going to recycle that same bit of music that keeps playing over and over again, and why is it seemingly devoid of any actual rhythm? Why does that black dog keep appearing and why is everyone so afraid of him when he's obviously not out to bite anyone but just wants a Milkbone or something?
The old school special effects, random zombie, even more random zombie baby and dopey gore scenes make this one more fun than it has any right to be. Oh, it's slow. Slower than any movie like this should ever be but it has enough moments of inspired lunacy that a very specific segment of horror fans will appreciate.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Forever Evil is presented in 1.33.1 fullframe and that appears to be its original aspect ratio. The IMDB says this guy was shot on 16mm but it looks to have been transferred to tape for editing purposes. Regardless, the quality here is okay considering the obscurity of the movie and the source materials that were probably available. Don't expect mind meltingly awesome detail, you won't get it and the picture is frequently soft but it's all plenty watchable and for the most part reasonably clean and colorful.
As far as the audio options go, you get your choice of a Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track or a Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound mix, and while it may be a case of revisionist history opting for the 5.1 mix, the sound quality here is cleaner and the levels slightly more appropriate (the sound of crickets is unusually overbearing in the 2.0 mix). The repetitive and wonderfully clunky synth-heavy score sounds good and if there isn't a ton of bass response or rear channel action here, for what it is the audio sounds fine.
Aside from the two versions of the movie included in this release (the director's cut is longer, features some scenes in a different order and has a bit more character development), we also get an audio commentary from director Roger Evans and writer Freeman Williams. This track is pretty interesting as the two are pretty honest here about what they feel worked and didn't work about the film. They discuss the locations, the cast and the effects but also what they had to scrap to finish the movie, what it was like working on a movie that had almost no budget and overall this turns out to be a pretty interesting discussion of the history of this bizarre micro-budget epic.
Aside from that, look for a trailer for the feature that gives away most of the good parts, a decent sized still gallery, a handful of deleted scenes, menus and chapter stops.
The Final Word:
Forever Evil is not a good movie at all but it is periodically inspired and occasionally pretty damn entertaining. Yes, it drags in spots (and how) and seems to have no sense of pacing whatsoever but it is not without its low budget charm. Fans of straight to video eighties indy horror film and all the seriously weird qualities that tend to accompany them will probably have some fun with this, and the commentary turns out to be a pretty enjoyable extra feature.
