976-EVIL

Directed by Robert Englund. United States. 1988.

I read a poll once that said 75% of millennials dislike talking on the phone because phone calls are “time-consuming”. I can totally relate, as I also only enjoy spending time with my friends when I don’t have to pay attention to them. These are also the people complaining about a loneliness crisis. Go figure. I don’t want to blame the victim here, but I wouldn’t want to spend time with these people either, especially if the idea of talking to someone over the phone sends them into paroxysms of existential despair. Like, maybe the cure for crushing loneliness is not to crave it and enable it. I don’t know. It’s just something to think about while you wait for the overdose to kick in.

Personally? I love talking to people. It’s a shame I don’t ever get to do it anymore because eww gross verbal communication icky icky. But I was a kid in the ‘80s and a teenager in the ‘90s. We fucking loved talking on the phone. Nowadays, the choice between a phone call and chatting on the Internet is a no-brainer for most people, but back then, that was a serious choice that demanded careful deliberation. If I talk on the phone, I can’t use the internet, but if I use the internet, how will I talk on the phone? Aristotle never had to wrestle with such moral conundrums.

Life was easier before dial-up internet made us choose between our friends and pornography. We just talked all night. Sometimes you’d hold the phone up to your boombox to play your friend a song. You’d lie on the floor with the TV on, watching the same show as the person on the other end of the line. Calls went from 6 pm to past midnight. We weren’t ashamed to enjoy time with our friends, even if it was only over a phone line. We liked hearing other voices besides our own. We didn’t wear our anti-social disorders like merit badges.

I’m not entirely sure when it became uncool and unwelcome to have an actual chat with a friend, but it has. The most unbelievable scenes in the recent SCREAM trilogy are all phone-related. The phone rings and these fucking teenagers actually pick up?! Sure, Jan. That’s the most unrealistic shit in horror movie history. It makes everything that happens in 976-EVIL look like a goddamn documentary in comparison. And what does happen in 976-EVIL?

976-EVIL is the directing debut of Robert Englund, best known for playing Willie the friendly alien on the NBC mini-series V. It begins with a man being killed when the pay phone booth he’s in inexplicably explodes into flames. From there, we meet Spike(!) and Hoax(!!), cousins living with Hoax’s hyper-religious mother, who, in fine Christian tradition, pilfers money from Spike’s inheritance. Spike is a cool guy. He rides a motorcycle, has a hot blonde girlfriend named Suzie, and hangs out with the school bullies, smoking cigarettes and playing poker. Hoax clings to Spike like a dingle-berry, a total virgin dweeb who spends his time between school periods having his head crammed into a toilet.

Bizarrely, even though Spike is a man’s man, he also really likes having his horoscope read. Oh, did I say ‘horoscope’? I meant ‘Horrorscope’. Spike has a habit of calling a 976 number to get life advice from some dial-a-psychic. The advice this hotline gives out leaves something to be desired. It seems to want the caller to do some hideous shit, like shoplifting, or sneaking out after dark, or murdering your cousin’s girlfriend. But hey, at least the calls are short. This is a 976 number in the 1980s, after all. $1.99 for the first minute and $3 for every minute after that. That’s a hefty price tag for bad advice. Spike resists these suggestions because he’s a good person. Hoax, on the other hand...

Oh shit, I never mentioned the fish.

So one night it starts raining fish. They’re all gone when we cut to the morning, so I don’t know if crazy Aunt Lucy got up early, grabbed a shovel, and got to work, or if the city sent out a clean-up crew. We don’t get to see the neighbors waking up to find their Buick absolutely destroyed by trout crashing through their windshields, or if someone was out walking their dog at night, only to be struck and killed by a falling carp. The details don’t matter anyway. It’s just a way to work religious magazine writer Marty Palmer into the story. He’s convinced that the shower of fish was a sign from god. He’ll matter more as the story goes along, eventually becoming the lead character for some reason.

Hoax develops a fixation on Suzie, even stealing the underwear she leaves in Spike’s room as a reminder of the uncomfortable sex they just had on a large plastic easy chair. Finding the flyer for the 976 number, Hoax calls it up. It basically tells him to follow Spike and Suzie to the movie theater. After Spike ditches Suzie to play poker with the bullies, she and Hoax head off to get a pizza together. It goes pretty well too, until the bullies show up and Suzie finds out Hoax has her panties in his pocket. Humiliated, Hoax runs home, picks up the phone, and once again dials the 976 number. This time, the voice on the other end tells him to do far worse shit than try to muscle in on his cousin’s arm candy.

Hoax draws a pentagram on the floor of this room. Using dark magic, he summons a hoard of spiders to scare Suzie to death. He doesn’t attempt to hide this either, flat-out confessing to Spike that he did it, that he killed Suzie because she was going to ruin his cool guy reputation. Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with Spike. He smacks his cousin around and tells him to get lost. Spike then runs to check on Suzie, reports her death to the police, and then heads off home to confront his cousin.

Nah, just kidding. He disappears from the movie completely.

Marty shows up at the high school and immediately strikes up a romance with the school principal. I guess she’s a character now too. Our ace reporter investigates the company that owns the 976 hotline. The guy in charge of the operation, the hilariously named Mark Dark, gives Marty a tour of the office. It turns out that there isn’t anyone on the other end of the line. It’s an automated system. But according to Mark, it hasn’t been operational in many months. How spooky is that, kids?

Well, someone really should have told Hoax this because that guy is racking up a helluva phone bill. Worse, he’s becoming a little bit demonic. He attacks the bullies at their poker game, tearing out their hearts. Seems the 976 line wasn’t trying to find just anyone. No, it wanted someone as fragile and easily manipulated as poor, dumb Hoax. He’s now a vessel for some demon. It turns Hoax’s house into an ice box and opens a fissure in the backyard that leads straight to hell. Marty and whatever her name is get trapped inside. Will they make it out alive? Where’s Spike? Will he be able to save his cousin? Do we even care?

The answer is no. I did not care at all. 976-EVIL gets progressively worse as it goes along. Which makes absolutely no sense, as it also gets more insane the longer it plays out. It should have gotten more entertaining, not less. Hoax, played by the great Stephen Geoffreys, begins the film as an insufferable twat. Every second he was on screen made me want to tear my eyes out. Normally in a film like this, the dweeby lil shit stain begins his evil transformation by becoming a little more confident, then more assertive, then he slicks his hair back, and the chicks start to notice, which annoys the bullies, but ha ha fuckers, here’s a couple fists for yer dumb mugs. How you like that, punks?

But then the transformation stops being cool and starts becoming frightening. The nerdy, abused kid becomes the abuser... but worse. He becomes corrupted. We stop rooting for him and start fearing him. The true villain emerges, and now we’re faced with the uncomfortable realization that we may need to put this once-relatable guy down.

Or we can just have him suddenly grow monster fingernails and carve a guy’s hand off. I guess that works too.

Hoax never becomes frightening. He only becomes more annoying. He becomes... UGHHHH... a pun factory. This is when I remembered who directed this film. Freddy Krueger himself. A movie monster that began as one of the most terrifying killers in the history of motion pictures, only to become a cringey weirdo who cannot stop himself from making horrible dad jokes. Kruger went from being literal nightmare fuel to being a late-night comedian, and any love I had for the A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET franchise died.

And remember Spike? Why exactly did the writers decide to kick his character to the curb right when things started to go south? We spent the whole movie detailing Hoax’s hero worship and how Spike, despite his outward bad-boy appearance, was a really good kid who got dealt a bad hand. Swapping out Spike, a character with personal stakes in the fate of Hoax’s soul, for some random magazine writer robs the film of any potential emotional depth and investment. It makes the climax feel inconsequential. Even when Spike does show up for the last moments of the final fight, it feels perfunctory, like the resolution of the main character’s emotional arc was an afterthought.

It’s nice to know that screenwriter Brian Helgeland got better at his job. This is the guy who would go on to write L.A. CONFIDENTIAL and MYSTIC RIVER. On the other side of that coin is Robert Englund, who most certainly did not get better at his job. Englund had one more feature film in him before calling it quits on his directorial career, choosing instead to keep turning in memorable performances in a slew of genre titles. Englund does manage a few neat tricks here and there, using techniques he obviously gleaned from his experiences on the ELM STREET films, but for the most part, the film is flat and visually uninteresting. It’s a real shame that 976-EVIL never gels into something memorable. This could have been a fun little romp with a genuine emotional core. I guess I was expecting too much from a movie about Satan reading people’s horoscopes over a premium phone line service. Ah well. My bad.