Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.0

New Year's Evil Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 5, 2015

New Year’s Eve festivities can be raucous in a lot of situations, not necessarily related to huge group swarms like the madness at Times Square every year. That general sense of chaos is played for scares in the lackluster New Year’s Evil, a film which both indulges in and defies a lot of tropes in the then nascent slasher craze that had seen an uptick in interest starting in the late 1970s. New Year’s Evil delights in a certain amount of blood and guts, of course, but for once the perpetrator of the mayhem is not a huge mystery kept under wraps (and/or a hockey mask) until a supposedly cathartic reveal in the last reel.

Diane Sullivan (Roz Kelly) is known as Blaze and is something of a media celebrity in the punk rock scene. Blaze is hosting a televised “countdown” show on New Year’s Eve that is monitoring the turning of the year across each of the nation’s time zones. Blaze is understandably concerned when she receives a threatening phone call alerting her to the fact that every time the clock strikes twelve across those time zones, someone important to her is going to be murdered. There are a number of red herrings (including supposed suspects) that are offered up in the film's early going, including Diane’s son Kip (Richard Sullivan), but the film pretty much reveals the "mystery" within seconds after having introduced the slicing and dicing element to begin with. The film never makes a whole whale of a lot of sense, with Kip being a panty sniffing (and eating) perv whose motivations are never overly explicated. That leaves the bulk of the film’s sporadic thrills to be gleaned from the expected amounts of spurting blood and jump cuts.

New Year's Evil Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

New Year's Evil is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This is a surprisingly decent looking transfer, though it's hobbled by some minimal age related damage to the elements. Colors have made it through the gauntlet of time largely unscathed, with reds especially vivid, making the gore scenes pop quite convincingly. Grain is quite heavy at times, clumping a bit unnaturally in some of the darker club scenes where Blaze is hosting her show. Detail is at least at adequate levels and frequently much more than that in close-ups.

New Year's Evil Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

New Year's Evil offers a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono mix that sounds just slightly clipped in the extreme higher registers, but which otherwise offers a rather full bodied presentation of the film's soundtrack. Dialogue and the film's frankly dated score come through very cleanly with no problems whatsoever.

New Year's Evil Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of New Year's Evil (1080p; 37:16)


• Trailer (1080p; 1:46)


• Commentary with Writer and Director Emmett Alston

New Year's Evil Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

New Year's Evil has a couple of interesting elements, including a relatively early reveal of the culprit doing all the slashing, but it's otherwise relentlessly formulaic and ultimately pretty silly. As with so many other horror films from this era, New Year's Evil has its share of hardcore devotees, and they should be generally well pleased with the technical merits of this release.