New Year's Evil (1980)
What's It About?
It's New Year's Eve and the host of a midnight countdown show on the West Coast is plagued by calls from a man who calls himself "Evil." Evil promises that as midnight strikes in each time zone he will murder a new victim until it becomes midnight in LA at which point he will kill her.
Is It Any Good?
New Year's Evil is one of the lesser known holiday slashers even though it was among the first. It's pretty widely known to be bad but I would disagree on that front. New Year's Evil is part of a sub-sub-genre I call the non-slasher. Non-slashers superficially look like slasher movies but they lack the elaborate murders, the lurid nastiness, and the iconic killers of what is considered to be the slasher genre they tend to be character pieces rather than body-count heavy schlockfests. Movies such as Death Valley, When a Stranger Calls, and Visiting Hours fit this mould.
In truth, New Year's Evil does crawl for a fair amount of its run time as we meet our killer and he does what's promised in a most uninteresting way. Then the movie weirdly enough becomes a bit of a farce as the killer begins facing complications in completing his plan.
The movie doesn't really become good until the final act when it completely drops its premise and reveals the motives of the killer. It is interesting how this movie shows the killer early on and instead lets the big reveal be the identity of this man rather than what his face looks like.
There are still better slashers out there, better non-slashers too (you'd do better to watch Visiting Hours than this) but New Year's Evil is relatively enjoyable for what it is.
Watch, Toss, or Buy?
Watch it.