The Scare Salon

I’m always game to check out an 80s horror flick I missed the first time around, so when a reader recommended the 1981 film Fear No Evil, I toddled on over to Shudder to give it a look. I seem to remember seeing the cover in the video store back in the day, but for whatever reason, I never rented it, maybe because it didn’t seem to stand out all that much.

Though I didn’t know this until after I watched it, Fear No Evil was the directorial debut of Frank LaLoggia, who would go on to direct one of my favorite 80s ghost stories, The Lady in White from 1988. Fear No Evil is a lot different and much cheesier than the classy, assured supernatural murder mystery LaLoggia is best known for, but Fear No Evil does have a few good things going for it. The soundtrack, for example, totally slaps, containing songs by the Sex Pistols, the Boomtown Rats, Talking Heads, the Ramones, the B-52’s, the Rezillos, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. The story does take some cues from The Omen and Carrie for sure, and even a bit from Grease, and it also leans pretty hard into the religious horror angle, so much so that it gave me a bit of an Alice, Sweet Alice vibe at times too.

Overall, though, I have to say I didn’t love it; the pacing was sort of uneven and really slow in spots, some of the acting was pretty cringe and overwrought, and I’m not sure if there wasn’t some (maybe unintentional) homophobia going on in there. It has some weird, WTF moments that are definitely entertaining, but I don’t think there were enough of them to make up for the long stretches of boredom.

The movie starts out sometime in the past, with a Roman Catholic priest named Father Damon (John Holland), who is supposedly the temporary human form of the archangel Raphael. After a battle undertaken at this castle-looking place on an island in upstate New York (that’s decorated with lots of sacrificed animals hanging everywhere), Damon kills a man who claims to be Lucifer by impaling him through the chest with a big staff-style cross. Lucifer doesn’t seem all that upset about it, telling Damon that he’ll be reborn anyway, so it’s no brimstone off his hooves, y’know? We find out later that the authorities didn’t believe the murdered man was Lucifer (typical), and sent Father Damon to prison, where he subsequently died.

The story then jumps ahead to the early 1960s, and we see the birth of a baby boy named Andrew to a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Williams (Barry Cooper and Alice Sachs). At the baby’s christening, there’s all kinds of supernatural jiggery-pokery, including a mysterious wind that blows everything around, and blood appearing on the religious statues as well as spewing out from under the baby’s sleeves. A big red flag, to say the least.

We then jump ahead another eighteen years, through an interesting transition in which we only see the outside of the Williams house as it begins to slowly deteriorate, and we hear voice-overs of Mr. and Mrs. Williams having a series of arguments about their son and how there might be something wrong with him, and how he might be driving a wedge between them.

Then it’s Andrew’s eighteenth birthday, and Mom has made him a cake. She puts it on the table and Dad goes upstairs to fetch the boy, but we only see Andrew’s shadow, and when Dad goes downstairs, the creepy teen is already sitting at the kitchen table even though no one saw him come into the room. Andrew, incidentally, is played by Stefan Arngrim, who I recognized from Class of 1984 and Strange Days, but fans of classic TV will also know that he’s the older brother of Alison Arngrim, most famous for her role as the bratty Nellie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie. Alarmingly, Alison later claimed that her brother had molested her all throughout her childhood, and it’s also been rumored that Stefan himself was likewise molested by a photographer and a press agent when he was a young teenager. Whatever the case, his skin-crawling awkwardness in this movie goes a long way toward making him one of the more effective aspects of the story.

At the birthday “party,” Dad fumbles and drops the cake while he’s trying to light the candles. Mom starts slapping him for his clumsiness, and Dad hauls off and knocks Mom to the floor, where an iron falls on her head and knocks her out cold. At first I thought she was dead, but it turns out she survived, but with severe brain damage.

Because Andrew is so off-putting, he’s unsurprisingly bullied quite a bit at school, even though he’s so intelligent that he gets straight A’s and later gets accepted to Harvard, Yale, AND Columbia. One of his main tormentors (sort of) is a dude named Tony (Daniel Eden), who reminded me of a cross between Billy Nolan from Carrie and Buddy Repperton from Christine, in that he has black, tragically feathered hair, smokes weed and mouths off to teachers, and casually smacks around his girlfriend Marie (Roslyn Gugino). Marie, it so happens, has a satin jacket with “Queen B” embroidered on the back, and all her friends have matching jackets that just say “The B’s.” So these are like the dollar store Pink Ladies, is what I’m guessing.

Anyway, there’s a very weird scene after gym class when all the naked dudes are in the shower, and Tony starts harassing Andrew, asking him for a date. He then goes over and kisses Andrew pretty…um…passionately, but then he starts to freak out because Andrew is supposedly doing something to him, though it’s not entirely clear what. Andrew, for his part, just seems upset and bewildered by the whole episode, as it becomes plain that even though the kid is obviously Lucifer reincarnated, he’s not fully aware of or in control of his Satanic powers.

While all of the high school stuff is going on, there’s also a B plot with an older neighbor lady named Margaret (Elizabeth Hoffman), who in reality is the human form of another archangel, Mikhail. She is also the sister of the dead priest, Father Damon. See, there are supposed to be three archangels who have been sent to Earth to fight Lucifer’s new embodiment, but Raphael already got killed, and the third archangel, Gabrielle, has apparently yet to manifest in a human body. Though this wasn’t all that clear from the movie, it turns out that someone can be hosting an archangel and not know it until the time comes to do battle with evil. Margaret is getting discouraged because Gabrielle hasn’t contacted her yet, and she’s sure that it’s getting close to the time to kick some Luciferian ass.

Meanwhile, Andrew is crushing on a classmate named Julie (Kathleen Rowe McAllen), but she’s already engaged to another fella named Mark (Paul Haber). One day during gym (again), Andrew loses it while the other guys are playing dodgeball, and supernaturally causes one of the balls to slam into Mark so hard that it smushes him up against the bleachers and ruptures all his organs. Again, this seems unintentional, as Andrew is distraught about it afterward. Not so distraught that he doesn’t paranormally turn up in Julie’s bed to molest her and leave three demonic scratches on her shoulder, but hey, the guy’s having a rough time.

So it turns out that after Mark’s death, the inconsolable Julie starts having dreams of Father Damon, who leads her to Margaret’s house, and at this point, we discover that Julie is actually hosting Gabrielle, the archangel. So she and Margaret vow to battle Lucifer together when the time comes.

For whatever reason, some of the students are doing a whole play of the Last Supper and Jesus’s crucifixion on an outdoor stage, and most of the townspeople gather to watch it. In a nearby bar, Andrew’s dad is ranting about his son being the Devil, but no one believes him and the bouncer kicks him out after he gets too rowdy. He then goes home and shoots his handicapped wife in the head, so that’s nice.

At the same time, a school dance is going on, but after Tony gets drunk and punches a guy in the bathroom for pissing on his shoe, he and his band of miscreants and Pink Lady knockoffs decide they’re gonna go have their own party elsewhere. They straight up steal a dude’s boat and head out to the castle-type place from the beginning of the movie.

Andrew/Lucifer is already out there, sacrificing dogs and wearing a sheer black robe, full makeup, and a curly perm. As I alluded to earlier, I’m not sure if the director intended to make it clear that Lucifer was gay, but the actor is sure camping it up like it was intentional, so I don’t really know how to feel about it. It’s a bizarre situation, that’s for sure, and it gets even more bizarre when Andrew magically wakes up a whole bunch of dead dudes who were buried on the property (I think it was mentioned earlier that these were all the workers who died when the castle was being built). Some of the guys look fairly normal, but some are completely zombified, covered with lumpy oatmeal and grue, with white contact lenses reminiscent of Evil Dead.

Tony and the gang arrive on the castle island and most of them proceed to get killed (offscreen) by the zombies. Andrew confronts Tony and supernaturally gives him women’s tits, which sounds completely bonkers, but actually relates back to something Tony said to Andrew earlier, about not believing the rumor that smoking weed would make you grow tits. Um…wait, never mind, that doesn’t make it any less weird, does it? Was there ever really a rumor that smoking weed would make a man grow tits? It just seems so random. Anyway, Tony is so appalled at having boobs that he screams, “Fuck you!” at Andrew, and then…proceeds to stab himself in said boobs, killing his own stupid self. Good job, Tony, you really showed that Lucifer what’s what.

Then Lucifer, cackling and over-the-top fabulous, takes the last remaining teenager (who I think was named Brenda and is played by Mari Anne Simpson) and puts her on an altar to sacrifice her. While all this is going on, Julie and Margaret have been hustling their buns off trying to get out to the island themselves so they can defeat Lucifer. I neglected to mention it earlier, but the Jesus play that was going on in the town square or whatever didn’t end so well; the guy playing Jesus started having stigmata, died, and then got struck by lightning, and everyone watching the play spontaneously started bleeding too. Everybody scattered, but started dropping dead, presumably of blood loss (or more lightning strikes). Margaret keeps talking about the Second Coming, so I guess that’s what this is? I dunno, I’m not religious, so I could be totally off base here.

Julie and Margaret finally get to the castle island with the big-ass cross, which is now glowing with the finest in glittery 80s special effects, and even though it looks like they arrive in time to stop Lucifer from stabbing Brenda to death, they let it happen anyway. Sorry, Brenda. So there’s now been a human sacrifice…does that mean Lucifer wins? Apparently not, because Julie and Margaret chase Lucifer through the castle, he ends up by the tree where the first incarnation of Lucifer got killed by Father Damon at the beginning of the movie, and the archangels attempt to get him to recite the Lord’s Prayer. He seems like he wants to, and he kinda does, but he keeps messing it up, and then he gets pissed off and snaps Margaret’s neck, leaving Julie to kill him with the magical power of the special effects cross. There’s then a shot of Margaret, Julie, and Father Damon all coalescing into one thing, the three angels as one (or something; it was brought up earlier, but I wasn’t sure what the exact iconography was supposed to represent).

So yeah, for an early 80s flick, this was okay, and had enough entertainment value and weirdness to keep me interested. Like I said, most of the acting wasn’t great, the mythology was unnecessarily convoluted, and some scenes dragged on way longer than they needed to, but if you’re interested to see a peculiar, occasionally boring, and unsettlingly homoerotic mashup of The Omen, Grease, and Carrie, then you might want to give it a go, even if only for the excellent soundtrack.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.