The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave
Lies and falsehoods! The summary of this movie on the back of my case claimed that this was a “creepy, kinky, Italian terror tale.” Sadly, what I encountered upon forcing my way through this flick was neither creepy, nor particularly kinky, nor even all that terrifying. This is what I get for expecting big things from budget movie collections. Oh well…on with the show!
"Ohhhh honey, I love you this much! But how come you never want to cuddle anymore?"
Premise: 2/5
Zero points for originality. If you’ve seen one “gaslighting” movie, you’ve probably seen them all. I don’t know how many there are, but for it to have it’s own sub-sub-category, there must be at least a few. For those unfamiliar with the term, “gaslighting” flicks are usually about a somewhat unstable rich person who gets remarried to try and get past the death of their previous loved one. Usually, the new one they get married to is a gold-digger who eventually does their damnedest to force their unstable spouse into having a complete mental breakdown so that they can score the estate and all their unfortunate victim’s money. Most of these movies follow that pattern, and the few that do deviate from it don’t wander too far.
This one’s not really an exception at all. There is one thing that seems a bit unique, though, and that’s the recipient of the gaslighting’s penchant for murdering hookers. And that only sounds like a joke! He offs two right in the beginning of the movie, which is I guess what the allegedly “kinky” part of it was. And as promising as that sounds, soon he quits murdering people and the movie gets back to the old predictable routine of slowly ratcheting up the “scares.”
Cast: 2/5
Well, just one look at the cast list and you can tell that at least this movie didn’t lie about it being Italian. We have Antonio de Teffe playing Alan Cunningham, our lord in residence and gaslight victim. We have Marina Malfatti playing Gladys, Alan’s brand new second wife. Giacomo Rossi-Stuart plays Alan’s psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Timberlane. And finally there’s Roberto Maldara, who plays Alan’s freewheeling cousin George, the party animal.
There’s a few other characters to mention in the movie, but since none of them are super-important, and nobody (even the main characters) are really that good anyway, I’ll leave them out. This movie’s a bit strange, too, in the fact that there’s almost no one you can ever feel any sympathy for. I mean, the protagonist offs two girls in the first half-hour alone, and has a tendency to flip out and slap the shit out of his new wife. You can’t feel bad for Gladys, either, ‘cuz she’s a gold-digging, annoying bitch. George is a hedonistic jerkoff, etc. Even the first wife’s brother, who you might expect to feel a twinge bad for, is a complicit bastard, who lets Alan kill his prostitutes and then blackmails him. And the doctor, who you’d think you might be able to at least look up to, doesn’t seem to know what to do to help Alan stop being a psycho. One minute he’s telling Alan to move out of his old ancestral castle and live in London, and the next he’s saying Alan should stay away from London on account of his nerves. Argh!
Special Effects & Cinematography: 2/5
Hrmm….I think this is maybe not entirely the fault of The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, which is why I’m not going to give this category a 1. There’s a few scenes that were blatantly edited out of the movies, because the cutting between two scenes is horribly done. For example, in one scene Alan’s hinting that he likes rough, weird stuff with his sex, and the next he appears to be stabbing the magically naked and bound hooker. Come to think of it, I can’t even be sure that she’s dead, or the second one either, for that matter, since the cutting really is that shitty. I was looking at buyer’s comments on Amazon.com and it seems like at least twenty minutes of story and more gruesome stuff were cut in this version, which might itself be a copy of a sanitized-for-TV version of the film. That blows!
Special effects suck, at least those that I was able to see, and the whole damn movie’s too dark in places to know just what it is you’re supposed to be seeing. Really, just move along and save yourself some time.
Popcorn Factor: 1/5
This movie totally fails to impress or amuse. It’s not gonzo enough to entertain, but it’s not serious enough to actually scare or disturb. Couple that with the craptacular editing and the dull pacing, and you’re left with nothing worth mentioning. The ending kind of comes out of nowhere, and is just weird enough to amuse for a second, and then the credits suddenly start to roll. You should probably avoid this one unless you can find an uncut version and are really that curious or desperate, because as it stands, this isn’t more than a movie to nap through.