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 dir. Eric Weston | 1981 | 89 min. written by Eric Weston and Joseph Garofalo Starring Clint Howard, R. G. Armstrong, Joseph Cortese, and Claude Earl Jones Music by Roger Kellaway Cinematography by Irv Goodnoff Evilspeak is a 1981 film concerning Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard), a young orphan at a military academy who finds himself in possession of the diary of Esteban (stylized ESTEBAN), a Satanic priest whose introduction in the opening scene involves a beheading match cutting to a soccer game. As he deals with bullying and attempts to raise a similarly orphaned puppy given to him by the sympathetic school chef, he translates the contents of the diary using a school computer, eventually summoning Esteban after an incident wherein some military school hooligans, after finding the church basement where Stanley has undertaken this translation project, decide to sacrifice the puppy on a drunken lark. Stanley is then possessed by the spirit, causing the nails in the hands of a crucifix in the church above to drip with blood as a priest delivers a sermon to the soccer team about how the real "big game" is the game the Lord plays for your soul. Stanley proceeds to murder them all by floating around the church, sword in hand and accompanied by a swarm of demonic pigs. After the incident, Stanley is institutionalized. This is the debut feature from Eric Weston, who would go on to direct The Iron Triangle, Come Out Fighting, and To Protect and Serve, notably featured on Joe Bob Briggs' TV series Joe Bob's Drive In Theater. The film is available in its entirety on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIE0BQNGckE As that synopsis may have communicated, this is a simple film, a blood-and-gore 80s horror film, but I think it can support serious, or at least jovial yet thoughtful, discussion. A few conversation starters: 1: Clint Howard, Leading Man This was Clint Howard's first role as a leading man, a rare occurrence as his next leading role wouldn't come until 1995's Ice Cream Man. Unlike that film, which featured Howard as a straightforwardly monstrous horror villain, this shows a side of Howard not usually seen in his more comedic bit parts. This is a tender and at times even tragic performance from Howard, who plays rather ridiculous situations like, say, learning that your adopted puppy has been murdered by a gang of drunken military teens, with an earnest pain that elevates Stanley from simply a vessel for Esteban to a character in his own right. One scene I'd like to highlight is the scene where Stanley talks with the school cook and is introduced to the orphaned puppy he eventually adopts, a scene which includes the following quote: Stanley Coopersmith, Evilspeak (1981, d.p. Irv Goodnoff) posted:Maybe you're right. Maybe this puppy is better off not making it. It's a tough world out there. You got to be able to kick and scratch if you want to survive. I found that out right after my parents died. From what I can tell, like these other pups, it's the ones that can do the most pushing and shoving that get the biggest piece of the pie. Fun fact: Clint Howard had to pay for his own toupee on this production. 2: Exploration of Military Culture In the grand tradition of boarding school movies (If..., School Ties, Goodbye Mr. Chips), portraying the institution as a hive of bullying and mistreatment is not particularly new, however, the way Evilspeak integrates the military school setting into the standard "boy meets boys, boy is emotionally and physically abused by boys, boy comes out the other end of said abuse either integrated into its culture or violently opposed to it" story bears looking at. 3: Video Nasties Evilspeak, probably because it involves a kid going straight up Devil May Cry 5 on a church full of fellow kids, was not well taken by the BBFC, which led to its inclusion in the "video nasties list", an artifact of a simpler time where banning something from an entire country was relatively easy to do. Evilspeak, alongside such titles as Antropophagus, Faces Of Death, and Gestapo's Last Orgy, was a Section 2 video nasty, which made any distributor found to carry it subject to prosecution for distributing obscene materials. How does this film's portrayal of Satanism and ritual abuse(not committed by the Satanists, exceptional for the 80s) look to audiences this far removed from the time and especially the distribution context? Additional viewing: the cast and crew speak about the film's production Previous Movies Of The Months I Before E fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Mar 29, 2019 |
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Mar 29, 2019 09:18
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 11:24 |
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This new run of MotM is off to a good start as this is another film I was able to go into without knowing much at all. While no character reaches quite the heights of Piper Laurie it definitely felt like the male version of the various versions of Carrie at times. I was also reminded of the fantastical computer logic of the 1980s wherein a computer could do magical things as also seen in Weird Science (1985). Lots of older films had the power of computers correct but they had no clue about the technology so they had to go the supernatural route. My $5,000+ dollar, 8-bit Apple II running at 1 MHz can summon Father Esteban?! Stanley turns to the occult and as Marguerite Perrin would say, "He's tampering in darksided stuff!" In the end the annoying bullying/hazing quartet finally gets their comeuppance. As Stanley flies around with his sword I saw a clear resemblance to Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham) gliding through the hospital rooms and corridors in Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988). Zogo fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Mar 31, 2019 |
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Mar 31, 2019 05:52
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I am always 10000% pro video nasty
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Apr 1, 2019 13:35
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The early Shin Megami Tensei games totally ripped off Evilspeak's black magic computer screen stuff.
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Apr 2, 2019 05:02
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I Before E posted:
Generals gathered in their masses/ Just like witches at black masses/ Everyone in the school has fully internalized military culture, including that Cooperfield character with his talk about the dog. I like that early on in the movie his being an orphan is brought up as if we're (like in a lot of 80s movies) to take his being a loser or/and the weird kid as an obvious effect of him not having a strong family unit, but then like right after we realize it's because the kids around him are constantly taking a huge poo poo on him 24. But that comes back to the dog though (and to the Black Sabbath lyrics), Clint Howard might be the satanist of the film because he goes through the whole Esteban.bat process, but it's the ostensibly upstanding military school student bullies who actually, happily, do the sacrificial deed. Clint Howard basically going Devil May Cry in a church on those kids and their instructors is him embracing military culture, not forsaking it. At the end of the movie he's a PTSD riddled mess from the movie's climax because part of him is on some level still a nice sort of normal human and not an ideal student of military culture. He did exactly what he was "supposed" to do all along by directly fighting back and that realization probably ruined him more than any of the supernatural stuff (since he has no problem dabbling in that throughout the film).
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Apr 2, 2019 05:19
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Neo Rasa posted:Generals gathered in their masses/ There are even literal war pigs.
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Apr 2, 2019 05:33
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K. Waste posted:There are even literal war pigs. Speaking of war pigs and Evilspeak and the Video Nasty list, that bit of them eating the body in the bathtub after killing the person was originally a bit longer but most of it's gone. That like one second it cuts too after the character dies before going to the next scene is all that's left. There a few minutes cut from the movie for it to be released but it's been available uncut for a while, though the rest of that sequence is lost.
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Apr 2, 2019 05:38
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Neo Rasa posted:Speaking of war pigs and Evilspeak and the Video Nasty list, that bit of them eating the body in the bathtub after killing the person was originally a bit longer but most of it's gone. That like one second it cuts too after the character dies before going to the next scene is all that's left. There a few minutes cut from the movie for it to be released but it's been available uncut for a while, though the rest of that sequence is lost. I got the feeling, the quality in that one shot is significantly worse than the rest of the film, it even seems like it might be duped from a tape source.
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Apr 2, 2019 07:05
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Well, this was enjoyable. I wish I had seen this as a kid over all the other craptastic flicks I somehow saw instead back then. It's like Taps but with pigs.
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Apr 11, 2019 03:28
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drat how have I never heard of this? granted I couldn't name a single Clint Howard movie if you put a gun to my head (besides The Wraith but idk if supporting counts) is this bad movie night material?
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Apr 22, 2019 03:08
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Is the extended cut of this worth checking out over the normal cut? It's 11-12 min longer.
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Apr 22, 2019 03:43
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MacheteZombie posted:Is the extended cut of this worth checking out over the normal cut? It's 11-12 min longer. There don't seem to be substantial changes, at least from what I can see. Alan Smithee posted:drat how have I never heard of this? I wouldn't call it a bad movie, but it's certainly in that 80s schlock category
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Apr 22, 2019 04:02
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I remember finding the opening scene to this mesmerizing.
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Apr 22, 2019 14:25
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In Coppersmith’s mind, his parents are dead and he’s been shipped off to a school where he can perform well, but everyone abuses him for reasons outside his control. Of course Father Esteban’s message of “the world is evil, therefore Satan is God” would ring true. Why shouldn’t he contact God/Satan and try to gain power in his situation?K. Waste posted:I got the feeling, the quality in that one shot is significantly worse than the rest of the film, it even seems like it might be duped from a tape source. I watched the Amazon Prime version, and there’s one more shot of degraded quality when the dude gets impaled on the chandelier.
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Apr 22, 2019 14:28
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Forgot this had a thread, but I actually saw this as a midnight screening last month on 35mm. Curiously, the print was crisp and in full color for the first half, but somewhere through the back end of the reels were suffering some bad color loss. Regardless, the part that's most interesting to me is why a computer? Why did the film go that route rather than just traditional arcane occult rituals to summon the demons? There's something it's tapping into about the ability of computers to open up pathways through the aether, and the infant internet as a means of communing with unseen forces. In a lot of ways, it's the schlock version of Pulse (2001), scratching at those same questions about the digital world opening up gates to the supernatural and terrorsome forces. Of course, the film pretty much coming down on the side that Satanism is Good further complicates this. Really fascinating work, the comparison to if.... is apt.
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Jun 3, 2019 18:28
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There's a lot to be said about the angle on Satanism/The Unknowable, Powerful Computer is presented as a sort of revolutionary empowerment/Faustian suicide bomb and how that relates to how the mass adoption of personal computers and the internet has changed how people relate to each other, but that'll have to wait.
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Jun 4, 2019 07:43
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I Before E posted:There's a lot to be said about the angle on Satanism/The Unknowable, Powerful Computer is presented as a sort of revolutionary empowerment/Faustian suicide bomb and how that relates to how the mass adoption of personal computers and the internet has changed how people relate to each other, but that'll have to wait. wait for what?? it's been months!
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Jun 7, 2019 06:40
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DeimosRising posted:wait for what?? it's been months! Obviously for the Evilspeak sequel, the Evilspeakquel
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Jun 7, 2019 07:47
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I Before E posted:Obviously for the Evilspeak sequel, the Evilspeakquel See now I need this, but there is no this. You sick bastard
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Jun 7, 2019 18:49
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 11:24 |
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A prequel about Esteban building his cult and how he was able to preserve himself in a computer despite it being like the 1700s called Prequelspeak.
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Jun 7, 2019 21:06
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