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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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EVILSPEAK
Rating: 
USA. 1981.
Director – Eric Weston, Screenplay – Eric Weston & Joseph Garofalo, Story – Joseph Garofalo, Producers – Eric Weston & Silvio Tabet, Photography – Irv Goodnoff, Music – Roger Kellaway, Photographic Effects – Robert D. Bailey, Special Effects – John Carter & Harry Woolman, Makeup Effects – Makeup Effects Lab (Supervisors – Allan Apone, Frank Carriosa & Douglas White), Art Direction – George Costello & Dena Roth. Production Company – Lenure Investment Co/Coronet Film Corporation.
Cast:
Clint Howard (Stanley Coopersmith), Don Stark (David ‘Bubba’ Caldwell), Charles Tyner (Colonel Kincaid), Joseph Cortese (Reverend Jameson), R.G. Armstrong (Sarge), Lenny Montana (Jake), Louie Gravance (JoJo), Jim Greenleaf (Ox), Lynn Hancock (Miss Freidemayer), Richard Moll (Father Lorenzo Esteban)
Plot: Stanley Coopersmith is a bullied cadet at the West Andover military academy. Placed on punishment detail, he is sent to clean up the chapel basement. There he finds a secret chamber containing several ancient tomes in Latin. He brings a computer down to translate them, but the personality of Father Esteban Lorenzo, a priest excommunicated by the Church in the 16th Century for practicing Satanism, begins to manifest through the computer. Becoming obssessed, Stanley exacts horrible revenge against his tormentors.
Evilspeak is one of the most amazingly silly horror films that one has seen in quite some time. It is construed as a variation on Carrie (1976) where a wimp/underdog takes revenge with the aid of some supernatural power. Diminutive, bugged out Clint Howard (the younger brother of Ron Howard), plays the role to nervous, wholly unlikable excess. But the film is constructed all wrong – the crude emotional thrust of films like this should be with the taking of revenge on the tormentors in sadistic strung-out detail, a la The Omen (1976) and its conveyor belt of novelty deaths. But instead the film mixes up where this thrust should be and places it on Clint Howard perfecting the occult ritual and has the revenge scenes take place all in one outburst at the end. With the exception of an hilariously silly scene where a woman is dispatched by killer pigs while showering, the whole film is one long drawn-out wait.
But when it all does start to happen at the climax, Evilspeak really outdoes itself in terms of silliness with scenes of Clint Howard throwing a body through the air where it is impaled on a chandelier and the blood drains into a handily placed goblet, or of chaplain Joseph Cortese being impaled in the forehead by a nail popped out from the statue of a crucified Christ as he gives a sermon. The final image of the diminutive Clint Howard exploding through the floorboards of the chapel, his receding foreline made to stand upright as he flies through the air, lopping the heads off his tormentors with a sword is one of the most unintentionally funny in all of 1980s low-budget horror films.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2011
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