Head Canon: 976-Evil (1988)

Welcome to Head Canon - a collection of weird and wonderful films that live rent-free in my brain. Nobody's saying these are the best movies ever made, but every week, I'll deliver some thoughts on a new title that, for one reason or another, has set up shop in my consciousness for the foreseeable future.

Dial D for Demon, as we revisit Robert Englund's nasty, Satanic phone line directorial debut, 976-Evil...

After a new horror icon is born, everybody wants another. Mostly to make money off of.

It’s true. Once Michael Myers began tearing up Haddonfield (and the box office), Jason Voorhees was conceived via a phone call between Sean S. Cunningham and Victor Miller, with this simple sentence:

“Halloween (’78) is making a bunch of money…let’s rip it off.”

Then, following Jason’s mom getting her head lopped off and her special needs son coming back to avenge her death in back-to-back Friday the 13th (’80) flicks, everybody wanted to give some masked maniac a big butcher’s knife, in hopes that the pile of cash he generated would be even bigger than the pile of dead teenagers.

There were maniacs in mining gear. Multiple deformed children. One of these brutes got on a train, and another hit up a Canadian prom to have some fun. Several made creepy phone calls to girls who were alone in their houses. College campuses became coed mortuaries. Campgrounds were hunting grounds. Sequels released in 3D. For roughly six years - from 1978 to 1984 (or the so-called slasher “Golden Age”) - these brutes became the bane of film critics' existence.

But they also made a shitload of money. 


Freddy Krueger arrived at the tail end of this initial epoch, courtesy of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (‘84), and with him came a whole new wave of pretenders. Only, instead of menacing some hot girl’s window, they appear in their dreams and hallucinations, often manifesting as a malevolent supernatural spirit. The son of a hundred maniacs had many children of his own, as everyone wanted to find the next Springwood Slasher and drag him through a whole new franchise.

Hoax Wilmoth (Stephen Geoffreys) was probably seen (by producers at noted C-tier junk house, CineTel, at least) as the “next Freddy”. Hell, they even went out of their way to get the man behind the glove himself, Robert Englund, to help create him. However, Hoax is probably closer to a male Carrie White, raised by a televangelist addicted cat lady aunt with plastic on the furniture (Sandy Dennis, off in her own Tennessee Williams hot house production), and bullied by a bunch of punk pricks who play poker in the projection booth of his suburban town’s local theater. His only “friend” is Spike (Patrick O’Bryan, who’s sort of like a Dollar General Peter Berg), but that guy’s too busy riding his motorcycle and banging the girl Hoax frequently fantasizes about (future Dream Warrior, Lezlie Dean) to keep a proper eye on the little snot.

976-Evil (’88) is a splatterpunk cousin to Elm Street that leans so hard into its Satan’s Sex Line anti-reality that it almost becomes a meta commentary on the (sub)genre itself. Bathed in neon and fog, it’s written by genre superstar (not to mention eventual Oscar winner) Brian Helgeland, the very same year he’d etch Nightmare 4: The Dream Master (’88) into the Mount Rushmore of Solid Slasher Sequels. Were you to pore over all the horror paperbacks in your local used bookstore, very few would conjure the same scents of spray-paint, cheap cigarettes, and urinal cakes, before leaving your head aching from the racket of basement punk music. It’s evocative because it’s a perfect document of late ‘80s teen sleaze, with very little socially redeemable value.

Getting Englund to direct 976-Evil is what elevates it above resembling a simple knock-off. Before he was Freddy, Englund had been playing a sordid assortment of rednecks, rapists, child murderers, and sinewy strange ones for everyone from Tobe Hooper (Eaten Alive [’76]), to John Milius (Big Wednesday [’78]), and Gary Sherman (Dead & Buried [’81]); not to mention numerous TV gigs and Movies of the Week. The guy knew his way around a cheap set and, once Kruger unexpectedly shot him into the public consciousness, capitalizing on that fame meant he could step behind a camera and actually try his hand at slinging some latex and karo syrup.

To tell the truth, Englund’s not too bad a director and, at the very least, proves he absolutely loves the genre he’s made his name (and not to mention a few beach homes) off of. Hoax’s high school is a graffiti’d war zone, and the all-day scare package marathon where Marcus (Back to the Future ('85) goon, J.J. Cohen) and his fellow horror flick freaks hang out is more suitable for 42nd Street than it is for a town square in Nowheresville, USA. And if anybody knows the value of a good villain, it’s one of the VHS aisle's finest freaks, as these cretins torment Hoax each and every day, before seemingly stealing the rest of the school's milk money. To paraphrase Third Eye Blind: can these guys graduate already?

Englund makes Marcus’ gang of shitheel bullies - which includes Billy Drago’s literal son, and a window-licker who insists on being called Airhead - cartoon character menaces. They drink, smoke, snort, fondle underage girls, and dunk Hoax’s head in the toilet for good measure. All while wearing various badass horror tees. They're Stephen King Capital B Bullies; motivated by little more than to humiliate this kid who seems to annoy them by barely breathing.

That said, Hoax doesn’t make it very easy on himself, and Stephen Geoffreys finally gets a chance to stop being the sidekick - this is Evil Ed from Fright Night (’85) and the chronic masturbator from Heaven Help Us (’84), after all - and actually take center stage as possibly the biggest loser twink of all-time. There’s a sort of drooling perversity he brings to this dork that distances him from Carrie White and makes him sadder and more sinister. When the turn comes, and Hoax transforms into one of the Devil’s deviant imps, exacting supernatural revenge on his tormentors after accidentally killing his crush, you totally buy into it. This dude's got some demons pent up.

Metatextually speaking, there's a queer reading of 976-Evil, seeing how Geoffreys eventually left horror to become a gay pornstar (under the nom de cumshot, Sam Ritter). While not quite the same as Rock Hudson slipping into the skins of chiseled heartthrobs for Douglas Sirk, there’s still a sense that Hoax and Evil Ed are the costumes Geoffreys got accustomed to wearing to blend into straight society; the "nerd" who nobody suspects has some rather lurid reveries in his head. The monster Hoax turns into is a representation of all the fantasies this particular dork’s repressed, and as the actor sashays around the lip of a newly opened gate to frigid Hell in his living room after tossing his victims’ literal hearts onto the card table and spitting campy one-liners, you can't help but feel Geoffreys embracing the liberation that comes with just letting it all hang out for the world to witness. Move over Freddy’s Revenge (’85), there’s a new Queen of Elm Street.

As human beings, we've done a lot of dumb shit throughout the ages, but 900 numbers definitely rank pretty high amongst them. In fairness, people have been conned into paying for illicit entertainment throughout history, but the thought of dropping $1.99/minute to have some weirdo read our "HorrorScope", or a 400-pound woman pretend to be a preteen vixen and whisper nasty nothings into our ear might be unfathomable to a younger generation of viewers. The fact that these exploitative gimmicks are key to the plot of 976-Evil (right down to, you know, the title) renders it even more of an artifact of a bygone pulp period.

976-Evil was a modest enough hit to warrant a Jim Wynorski-helmed DTV sequel, which sees Mark Dark (Robert Picardo, who didn't return for his cameo) reach out and touch a psycho teacher with his telephone line to Hell (spoiler: it's actually better than you'd imagine). Did the Internet end up cancelling this franchise by introducing a new way for flesh and fury to be piped into our most impressionable society members' brains? Or did Englund's attempts at exploiting his own legacy simply arrive too late during the slasher boom to make a significant cultural dent? Either way, Freddy's first (and really only worthy*) directorial effort remains a proper curio that seems destined for rediscovery at some point; a splattery window into the dumb ways we used to get our rocks off with a mere landline.

*If Killer Pad ('08) has shooters, let me know in the comments below.

976-Evil is now available on Blu-ray, courtesy of Eureka Entertainment.