Looking back, "976-EVIL" offers a few insights at a strange decade. For those of you too young to remember, people did a lot of silly things in the 1980s. Some of us wore leg warmers in the summer, crimped our hair and spoke in fake British accents. And we haven't even gotten to A Flock of Seagulls and breakdancing.
One of the stranger oddities of the '80s, though, might be the telephone hotlines. There was seemingly one for everything: chatting with "friends," phone sex, horoscopes, psychic readings, gambling and more. Basically, you were charged an exorbitant amount of money (usually per minute) to listen to what is often a heavily scripted and/or recorded message. Many of these hotlines featured a prefix of "976" and, later, "1-900."
Thus the premise of "976-EVIL," where people call to get their dark fortune told to them via a recording. Only this recording is the voice of the Devil. Yes, not just a devil, the Devil. And the Devil just LOOVES to offer "Horrorscopes," which he apparently read out of a newspaper and just replaces some words with "dark" and "evil" because HORROR.
Our hero for this film is Spike (Patrick O'Bryan, who sort of looks like a young Johnny Drama from "Entourage). Spike, as you may judge from his name, is a bit of a hooligan; he smokes and plays poker in an old movie theater with his buddies, who all wear fedoras or earrings or shirts with vertical stripes. During the day, these hoods hang out in the bathroom of their high school and torment nerds like Hoax (Stephen Geoffreys), who happens to be Spike's cousin.
Spike is rather fond of Hoax and doesn't take too kindly to people bullying him, so imagine his shock when, several minutes after Spike arrives at their latrinal hangout, his pals are giving Hoax a rather vicious swirlie. Spike objects, but his buddies prefer sadism to friendship, so Spike has to get rough with them to make them stop.
Spike is also an orphan and lives in a sort-of apartment with his nutty Aunt Lucy (Hoax's mother, played by Sandy Dennis), who is abusive to Hoax and rails Spike for his hoodish ways.
So Spike finds himself calling this rather lame "horrorscope" line, where he finds quixotic, oddly specific messages that seem to be encouraging his bad behavior. At one point, Spike considers stealing some gloves from a store, and the Horrorscope line calls him to tell him to take what he wants.
Soon, Hoax is calling the number, and, left emotionally vulnerable from a lifetime of abuse, succumbs and becomes possessed by the evil phone demon.
Between this film and his turn as Evil Ed in "Fright Night," Geoffreys created two of the creepier corrupted nerds of '80s horror. He manages to evoke feelings of sympathy and annoyance and, once turned, feels like a legitimate threat as the geek embracing his dark side.
There is a decent amount of goofy gore in "976-EVIL," with the centerpiece perhaps the sequence where Hoax joins the regular poker game his tormentors hold armed with a pair of hearts ... literally. There is also a rather creepy shot of a character being devoured by her own cats.
Most of the effects are predictably cheesy. The turned Hoax has rubbery-looking hands and silly-looking skin lesions, and most of the other special effects are of the low-budget side of normal for the era.
There's not a whole lot of gratuitious nudity, though there's a brief nekkid sex scene involving Spike and his girlfriend, Suzie (Lezlie Deane). Hoax spies on them and ends up swiping Suzie's panties in the scene where Hoax begins turning down the road to evil. But overall, "976-EVIL" is something of a surprising sausage fest (with the exception of a female teacher thrown in to be menaced late in the film), with even a few homoerotic undertones here and there.
A couple of tidbits of trivia about "976-EVIL": it was written by Brian Helgeland, who would go on to win an Oscar for his script for the great crime drama "L.A. Confidential," and has written films such as "Mystic River," "42" and "Man on Fire," as well as "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master." That film, of course, starred Robert Englund, who directed "976-EVIL."
"976-EVIL" isn't what I'd call must-see '80s horror, but it is at times a fun curiosity. If you're ever up late and bored, pick up the phone and dial "976-EVIL."