Evils of the Night (1985)

This staggeringly awful film was brought to you by Mardi Rustam, formerly a producer for Al Adamson (Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), The Female Bunch (1971)) who had scored hits with Ray Danton’s Psychic Killer (1975) and Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive (1976) before deciding in the mid-80s that he could direct as well as produce. This dreadful bit of old tat disavowed him of that notion fairly quickly (he had one more try in 1997 with the biopic James Dean: Live Fast, Die Young) though he clearly had an interesting contact book as, alongside the pretty but dreadful younger cast members, he managed to rope in some genre veterans and even had few porn stars making a half-hearted bid for a low-budget crossover into something only marginally less disreputable.

Somewhere in the woods, a group of horny teens have sex and take drugs like their auditioning for the next Friday the 13th film. But before a hockey-masked killer can put in an appearance a UFO lands and the youngsters meet very sticky ends. A group of aliens, Dr Kozmar (John Carradine), Dr Zarma (Julie Newmar) and Cora (Tina Louise), set up shop in a nearby hospital where they drain blood from humans to help prolong their own lives. They employ a pair of psychopathic garage mechanics, Kurt (Neville Brand from Eaten Alive) and Fred (Aldo Ray from every other low budget film of the 80s) to kidnap teenagers for them and they target a group of young campers.

Torturously slow moving, packed with terrible attempts at humour and seemingly consisting of three entirely different scripts (one has the porn stars getting naked and having sex in the woods, another has Carradine and the other aliens up to no good in the hospital and the other has the cast of non-actors tied up in a basement being menaced by Brand and Ray). It feels like Rustam, who co-wrote this garbage with Phillip D. Connors, another refugee from the world of hardcore porn, started out trying to make a softcore romp and got fed up, switching tracks to some sort of proto-torture porn nonsense instead. And indeed that’s not all that far from the truth.

Rustam had somehow got hold of distribution rights to obscure 1975 horror film God Bless Dr. Shagetz, directed by “Edward Collins” (actually Curtis Hanson, later of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) and L.A. Confidential (1997) fame), Larry Spiegel and Peter S. Traynor, and which had been released briefly in 1977 before vanishing into the vaults. The production history of Dr Shagetz is a convoluted one and was going to become even more complicated when Rustam got hold of it, re-edited it, shot new footage and released it on video under the title Evil Town in 1985. Evils of the Night – which had been shot in 1983 – languished without a distribution deal for two years and Rustam re-shot some of the material he had filmed for Evil Town and used that here, also recycling the plot of Hanson and co’s film but with aliens instead of the eponymous mad scientist.

To populate this farrago, Rustam called on a cast on no-hopers and nobodies (few of them went on to anything at all really and for some this was their only screen credit) and propped them up by calling in some old-timers who, no matter how much rubbish they’d appeared in before, deserved better than this. Carradine (demeaning clad in a ludicrous silver spacesuit) mumbles his way through what is in effects an extended cameo, giving little appearance that he even knew where he was let alone understood the script, Tina Louise and Julie Newmar wander in and out of the plot as they were available, Ray and Brand barely cross paths with the others and the porn stars – Amber Lynn, Jerry Butler (using his birth name, Paul Siederman), Crystal Breeze (also using a pseudonym, Lisa Stanyo) and Shone Taylor (name misspelled as Shane) all do exactly what you’d expect of them, the first two getting the slightly more substantial roles, the latter just a couple having sex in the woods.

Perhaps understanding in advance that they weren’t going to be getting world class performers, Rustam and Connors don’t even try to give them characters – they’re just the usual collection of jocks, airhead bimbos, nice girl lead, mad scientists (albeit alien mad scientists, not that it makes much of a different) and gibbering psychopaths whose names you’ll forget as soon as they wander off screen. It often feels like there wasn’t actually a script at all and that Rustam was just making stuff up as he went along, which may explain why we get to see the same two characters trying to escape captivity twice, in exactly the same way each time.

It’s extraordinary that a film which ticks so many exploitation boxes (aliens, nudity, sex, drugs, power tool murders) can be as boring as Evils of the Night, but somehow Rustam manages it. Even the most devoted adherent of the notion that there are some films that are “so bad they’re good” will be hard pressed to justify their love for this one (though it no doubt has its fans – everything does after all). This is just simply bad, terrible in fact and as heinous a waste of anyone’s valuable 80 odd minutes as it’s possible to conceive.