Good movie but grossly overrated

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

***SPOILERS*** Typical hunted house movie but with a twist in that the Devil himself, Victor Buono, lives in it and has been locked in the sub-basement for some 1,000 years. That's until avowed atheist and non-believing psychology professor A.C Arnold, Richard Crenna,releases him by pulling out the Christian Cross that kept him locked in all these years. C.J and his wife Caroline, Joanna Pettet, had bought the old pre Civil War Varges estate and plan to turn it into a drug rehabilitation center with the help of C.J's young protégé Psycology Professor Raymond Guy, Andrew Prine, and a number of his more then, in bing around and with the cute and handsome Raymond, willing students helping him clean it up in time for its grand opening the following month.In no time at all things start happening to the students that have no earthly or logical explanation! They together with the pet German Shepard Kaiser start getting knocked off one at a time by an unseen and evil entity that they unknowingly activated. It's Caroline who's a bible believer unlike her husband C.J, as well as everyone else in the house, who soon realizes that all this craziness that's happening in the house happens to be the Devil's work! in fact Caroline is able to see the ghost of Emilio Varges, Emory Souza, the previous owner of the house who's warning her to leave the place with everyone in it before the Devil gets his hands on them! As it turned out it's when the cat's finally out of the bag or the Devil out of the sub-basement that C.J comes to his senses in realizing that the Devil s on the loose and he's the one who made that all possible! But by then with almost the entire cast of the movie killed off it may be just a bit too late for him to do anything about it!***SPOILERS*** In what turned out to be the final battle between good and evil in the film has C.J pitted against the Devil himself who's all dressed in white,looking like "the Man from Glad",not his traditional Devil's Red. As the Devil gets into C.J's skull and puts the squeeze, by giving him a super size migraine headache, on it and just when it looked like he just about had it that Caroline pops out of nowhere with Christian Cross in hand to come to his rescue. The Devil for his part got a bit too overconfident and had dropped his guard not realizing that Caroline was somewhere in his domain, the sub-basement, and even worse then that had, in knowing the power of faith, his number. As for everyone else in the movie including the drunk caretaker of the house Sam, Ed Bakley, they all ended up dead by either fire a fall from grace or from a balcony or electrocution, the Devil's favorite way of killing his victim, and only Professor Raymond Guy was lucky enough to end up getting, if you can call it that, a proper burial. That's by him being swallowed up alive during a raging thunder and lighting storm in a quicksand pit outside the Varges Estate!

The Evil is a brave but rather lacklustre attempt to make a haunted house film in the same style as "The Haunting". It's not too bad but there are a number of reasons why it doesn't really work. The story is very simple...a number of people rent a large old house for a prolonged stay, only to find once they have moved in that something sinister lives there, but they finds out too late and become locked in – many terrible things happen before they few remaining survivors confront the evil entity itself and try to defeat it.Let me start with the things that did impress me. First of all the cast are on the whole pretty good, with only a few weak links in there. Joanna Pettet makes a convincing heroine, and most of the supporting cast are pretty good too. And for a while the ghostly apparitions that confront the cast are quite effective, especially the white hazy figure of a man who appears fleetingly and indistinctly at the start of the proceedings. Some off the other effects are not bad either. People are flung about by unseen forces, which looks pretty convincing, and there is an effective scene of an assault on one woman who effectively portrays the situation without looking like she's doing it all herself. There's even a brief gore shot involving a circular saw which surprised me! Plus the film all seems to be shot on location, and even though it's evidently not a high budget production, the scenes all look good and are well filmed.Now for the drawbacks...well I said the film is set inside what appears to be a genuine large empty house, but the place is one of the ugliest, drabbest mansions I have seen in a haunted house movie It looks far too modern to have any ghostly atmosphere, and the outside in particular completely lacks any stylish design, with some dismally plain stained glass windows and a ridiculously top heavy tower to round things off. However, it's certainly huge, and some of the interior rooms look like banqueting halls, although they are all completely devoid of any effective period features.. bar one amazing over-sized fireplace that the director wisely sets a few scenes in front of whenever he gets the chance.Apart from that it's just a few below-par performances and lame death scenes that stop the tension from mounting as much as it could do, but things roll on in an agreeably entertaining fashion – until, that is...the CLIMAX! Oh my god. The end of the film has caused much debate among film fans, but I'm afraid I fall squarely on the side of the detractors. The climax of the film is a huge mistake. You can read about it elsewhere (I won't spoil it here), but be warned that the force behind "The Evil" which we all knew was lurking in the cellar turns out to be something so un-frightening that you might lose all respect for the film at this point. Which is a shame as everyone involved in the film is obviously trying hard to make it work. Even the background music swells into completely over-the-top dramatics as each "highlight" appears on screen, but nothing can save things from the really bad closing 15 minutes.Quite hard to get now, as there seems to be no DVD at time of writing and all VHS versions are out of print. As haunted house films go, it's around the middle mark. It could have been higher in the rankings if the climax had been re-thought, but it's too late now, so "The Evil" is stuck with it's reputation as a failure, and all because of the last 15 minutes, which is a real shame as for most of it's running time, the proceedings are all pretty well handled.

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!

The Evil could easily be seen as a front runner to eighties classics such as The Evil Dead and Night of the Demons. I don't doubt the possibility that this film had some sort of influence on the aforementioned titles, probably some others too; but in it's own right, it's not all that special. The plot is something of a mixture between the popular demonic horror theme, and the even more popular haunted house theme as we follow a group of people trapped inside an old house that happens to have something to do with an old Indian burial ground. The film was obviously shot on a low budget, and it's nowhere near as grisly as its eighties counterparts - so The Evil is unlikely to give you any nightmares. The plot follows psychologist C.J. Arnold. He buys an old mansion at a low price and decides to ask some of his college pupils to help him fix things up. Everything's going fine until somebody is stupid enough to remove an old cross from a basement door - and then all hell breaks loose! It would seem that the devil wants everyone inside dead, and so begins a night of terror as the occupants try to escape.'Evil' is a very general term, so any film dealing with it as an entity needs an original way of handling things. This film does it in a similar fashion to how The Evil Dead went on to do, as the evil is explored through certain characters going mad and others being chased by a disjointed camera angle. The film does feature a number of set pieces that show the effect of 'evil', and these vary in quality although in the main body of the film is really terrible. The film features things such as a man sawing through his own hand, a ghost taking possession of a woman and a man being dragged into the ground quicksand style after escaping from the house. The acting is all pretty terrible, and the copy I saw was of rather poor quality; so my overall impression of the film's production values isn't exactly good. The Evil isn't exactly a famous film, but one sequence that does have a fair amount of people talking about comes at the end. Victor Buono gets to appear as the Devil in one of the most of the oddest satanic scenes I think I've ever seen. Quite why the producers decided to film the Dark Lord in this way is anyone's guess - but I can't say too many bad things about it because it is at least memorable! Overall, I wouldn't exactly call this film a must see; but its decent enough and you could do a lot worse!