MartinHafer "The Evil" (also known more appropriately as "House of Evil") is a very simple, relatively low-budge film that was shot in only 30 days. So, you'd expect it to be crap...but oddly, it isn't.Richard Crenna and Joanna Pettet head a cast of various folks who are soon to become victims of a demoniacally possessed mansion. However, most of the folks spend much of the film trying to rationalize and explain away the weird and malevolent happenings in the place. But when folks start getting tossed about like rag dolls and the place seems to have a mind of its own, the only reasonable explanation is evil!The film has a lot going for it. The ghosts look amazingly realistic and the stunts do as well. Plus, the film is more than just gore and death. Well worth seeing if you like horror flicks.

Coventry "The Evil" is presumably one of the most prototypic Haunted House movies ever made and the screenplay embraces almost every tiniest clichéd element you expect in a film of this sub genre, from ghostly appearances only one character can see over possessed pet dogs and onto puddles of quicksand in the front garden. I'm rather skeptical towards these haunted mansion movies, because usually they're 90% boredom and false scares, but somehow I always had good feeling about "The Evil" and felt an inexplicable desire to track this fairly obscure late 70's movie down. The good news about "The Evil" is that the plot may be clichéd and unoriginal, at least the film never once suffers from a dull or tedious moment. The production values may look cheap and tacky, but there's always something spectacular or engrossing going on to entertain you. The characters are nitwit stereotypes and yet the players depict them vividly and with great enthusiasm. And so the list of contradictory anticipations goes on, making "The Evil" actually a very worthwhile and underrated gem in its kind. Psychiatrist C.J. Arnold (Richard Crenna) and his devoted wife Caroline purchase a very ancient and isolated mansion with the intention of renovating it into a rehab clinic for some of C.J's toughest drug addict patients. Terrible idea, obviously, since the house contains the most ultimately malignant forces and, during the opening sequences, we already witnessed how these forces viciously killed the caretaker in the incinerator room. Caroline immediately senses the spiritual warnings coming from the builder's restless spirit, but stubborn and overly rational C.J. continues with the renovations together with a handful of friends and patients he recruited to help. When he stupidly removes a sacred cross in the basement, the house promptly locks up all entries and all satanic evil from the pit below becomes unleashed. The disposable supportive characters continue to meet their gruesome and nasty deaths (electrocutions, burned alive, drowned in mud…) until C.J. discovers the house actually had a resident already! No less than Satan himself – played by crazy old Victor Buono and resembling an awful lot like what you would expect God to look like – lives in the pit underneath the place and amuses himself a great deal with terrorizing the new tenants! The script of "The Evil" contains several illogical and excessively campy twists (including the whole 'encounter-with-Satan' finale) but it's all strangely tolerable thanks to the fast pacing and high number of imaginative death scenes. The history of the house and its builder Emilio Vargas, as well as why evil chose to live there exactly, never gets properly clarified and there several more things that don't make the slightest bit of sense, but I guess you have to overlook this sort of things. Director Gus Trikonis maintains an admirably sinister atmosphere throughout the entire movie and some of the set pieces look genuinely macabre. The entrance to the pit, more or less illustrated on the gloomy poster image here on the website, looks and sounds really creepy and the house's auto-lock system of doors and windows is grippingly tense as well. "The Evil" isn't the type of film you check out for its intellectual content or superbly written dialogs, but in case you look for sheer thrills, bloodshed and uncanny ambiance you definitely won't regret a viewing.

Woodyanders Compassionate psychologist C.J. Arnold (a fine, bearded Richard Crenna, who starred in the hilariously horrible made-for-TV hoot "Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell" around the same time) and his supportive wife Caroline (gorgeous brunette Joanna Pettet) purchase a huge, creepy, rundown old mansion with the intention of transforming it into a drug rehabilitation center. A kindly apparition warns Caroline to leave the house, but the stubbornly rationale C.J. balks at the idea that the eerie abode might be spooked and invites a team of college students (genial unsung 70's action movie tough guy Robert Viharo and fetching femme faves Cassie Yates and Mary Louise Weller among 'em) led by C.J.'s good buddy Professor Raymond Guy (a nicely subdued performance by the usually more manic Andrew Prine) to help him clean the dingy place up. Things turn sour and get mighty harrowing when C.J. accidentally releases an ancient and extremely malevolent phantasmagoric force that's been confined in the basement for a long time. Said force proceeds to gruesomely decimate most of the cast (grisly electrocutions, a possessed German Shepard causes a chick to take a fatal spill down a flight of stairs, Prine drowns in quicksand, and so on) before C.J. and Caroline discover that none other than Beezlebub his horned, devilish self (a sumptuously ripe, show-stopping slice of grand thespic ham by Victor Buono) is behind the whole diabolical shebang.While the plot might not sound too promising (in fact, it's pretty threadbare), "The Evil" still qualifies as a superior supernatural scarefest because the invigorating deftness and straightforwardness of the execution wholly compensate for the story's dearth of originality. The direction by the always efficient and underrated 70's exploitation feature ace Guy ("The Student Body") Trikonis bristles with remarkable élan, style and restraint. Furthermore, Trikonis adeptly covers all the mandatory bases to make this picture pass muster as a solid little horrorshow: a fair amount of alarming, pulse-quickening tension is ably created and sustained throughout, uniformly on the money acting, a fleshing-crawling score by Johnny Harris, a galloping pace which never lets up for a minute, properly ugly and unpleasant death scenes, a grim gloom-doom mood, shadowy cinematography by Mario DiLeo, and a cogently stated central thesis which firmly argues that not only must supernatural events and entities be accepted and dealt with on their own logic-defying otherworldly terms, but also that the sole way to effectively thwart evil is through direct and aggressive means. To sum up, this honey certainly rates as a a real killer diller haunted house thriller.

jrasche2003 I remember seeing this movie as a child, and how it scared me! Well one day I was lucky to find the VHS at a garage sale. Last night I finally put it on to a DVD, where it will never ever wear out.I think Richard Crenna did a great job in this film. I think the film itself was a bit before its time with some of the special effects. The look cheesy compared to todays standards, but for a movie coming out of the 80's it is remarkable.I am really surprised at how little information is out there about this movie, It is one of those small classics that got lost, and I am sure glad that I still have it!