Evil Everywhere takes place in 1987, two years after an evil force started killing off the senior class in alphabetical order. Social pariah Zeke Zanderfeldt (Mykee Morettini, the film’s writer and director) managed to figure out a way to stop it, or so they thought. Now the killings have resumed and Jake Davis (Jared Walker) must track Zeke down and, along with theatre arts standout turn sorceress Julia Lochley (Corrinne Mica, Don’t Save Me) they must stop the evil, this time permanently.
The film is actually a sequel to Paura Tutto, an eleven-minute parody of Italian horror films that Morettini made in 2014 and is available on YouTube. You don’t have to have seen it before watching Evil Everywhere, but it’s free and a quick way to find out if this is your kind of film. And Evil Everywhere is not a film for everyone. It’s a low/no-budget film for starters and its lack of polish will turn a lot of people off.
Since it’s a parody it can pass some of that off as part of the joke. 80s VHS horror, Italian or otherwise, was full of obvious dubbing, bad acting and horrible dialogue. The overdone dialogue is actually some of the funniest material in the film. A lot of it sounds like it was translated into English by someone using a traveller’s dictionary and read by actors who didn’t speak English either. You may have to have sat through something like Lady Terminator to fully appreciate just how funny it is though.
It’s also a film that has very little story or structure and intentionally so. Much of Evil Everywhere’s sixty-four minute running time is given over to outrageous and frequently bloody death scenes. The effects used range from surprisingly effective, such as a face repeatedly slammed into an old manual typewriter to the ridiculously fake, a drumstick pushed through the eyehole of a paper mask. There is some CGI used for things like fire effects and glowing eyes. But again the primitive effects feel like what we would have seen in a film from the VHS era.
One effect Evil Everywhere should have lost however is the digital print damage. Thankfully there isn’t that much of it, but not only is it annoying, but it’s also out of place here. This is supposed to look like an 80s VHS, not a 70s grindhouse film. If they were going to add anything it should have been tape damage and tracking noise. Or, best of all, not added either of them.
Horror comedy is hard to do right, and while it’s not another Shaun of the Dead, Evil Everywhere is miles ahead of The Paintball Massacre or The Snarling and at least as good as Fanged Up. Too many of these films try to go after too many targets and, like Sharks of the Corn, end up a bloated, incoherent mess that runs out of laughs well before the final scene. Morettini wisely keeps the film short and at least somewhat focused on jokes that should appeal to its audience.
If you can deal with the film’s cheapness and intentional cheesiness, this is an amusing stew of demons, evil priests and heroes who are in way over their heads. If you haunted your local video store looking for films like Evil Clutch and Specters then Evil Everywhere should appeal to you. Although it might help to be as wasted as you were in the 80s while watching it.
Evil Everywhere comes to DVD and Digital on May 25th from Wild Eye Releasing. You can check the film’s Facebook page for more details.