Staying in tonight? Want some thematically appropriate festive viewing? I recommend grisly low-budget slasher flick New Year’s Evil (1980). Tagline: “Don’t dare make new year’s resolutions … unless you plan to live!” In Los Angeles, glamorous hard-boiled celebrity DJ and television’s first lady of rock’n’roll Blaze Sullivan (Roz Kelly) is hosting “Hollywood Hotline”, a live televised coast-to-coast New Year’s Eve countdown. Viewers are encouraged to phone in to vote for their favourite New Wave song of the year - but one of the callers is a misogynistic serial killer calling himself “Evil”, who threatens to murder a “naughty girl” as each time zone hits midnight – culminating with Blaze herself!
What distinguishes New Year’s Evil is its focus on the punk subculture. Considering it was filmed in LA in 1980, the mind boggles at the actual bands the filmmakers could have feasibly utilized for the musical sequences: X, The Screamers, the Germs, the Zeros, The Weirdos! The presence of any of these would make New Year’s Evil a valuable time capsule. But no – we see only two appalling ersatz punk bands (nonentities Shadow and Made in Japan), and at tedious length. The film’s received wisdom about how punk rockers behave (they are troublemakers with piercings and Mohawks who mosh and stick their tongues out a lot) is unintentionally hilarious. New Year’s Evil also fails to clarify why hardened young hardcore punk fans are so rabidly enthusiastic about sequin-clad middle-aged Blaze. Is it because she exhorts things like “It’s time to spin out and boil your hair!” while wielding a feather boa?
Which brings us to Roz Kelly. In her brief heyday, she was best known for portraying Pinky Tuscadero, Fonzie’s tough cookie girlfriend in seventies sitcom Happy Days. Her screen presence was certainly … um … distinctive. Whether playing Pinky, Anthony Franciosa’s brassy secretary Flaps (yes – Flaps!) in Curse of the Black Widow (1977), cavorting in Paul Lynde’s infamous 1976 Halloween special or indeed here as Blaze, Kelly is consistently abrasive, brittle and borderline hostile. Her bizarre acting choices are perhaps the scariest aspect of New Year’s Evil!
Watch it for free on YouTube.
