The Evil (1978)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Given the fact that this movie is from 1978, it is still a movie that holds its own today. Yes, the effects are hopelessly out of date, but the movie is more than just a hollow special effects movies (as many of todays movies are), and it is driven by the storyline and atmosphere."The Evil" is essentially a haunted house movie, where a doctor rents a vacant house to open a clinic. He accidentally unleash the supernatural powers that are confined deep within the heart of the old house.The acting in "The Evil" was good, and people did fair jobs in bringing the individual characters to life on the screen.Now, I will say that the movie was a bit over-dramatic. How? Well, for starters the music throughout the movie was just overwhelming in the attempt to add to the atmosphere, and it was bordering on being too annoying. And there was just way too much going on in the movie. Sure it kept the boredom at bay, but it felt like director Gus Trikonis was trying to put every single horror idea he ever had into an 89 minute long movie. It was just too much, and it sort of went from dread and despair into 'what will the haunt do in the next scene?'. Which was a shame.But all together an enjoyable enough movie given its age.

"The Evil" (also known more appropriately as "House of Evil") is a very simple, relatively low-budge film that was shot in only 30 days. So, you'd expect it to be crap...but oddly, it isn't.Richard Crenna and Joanna Pettet head a cast of various folks who are soon to become victims of a demoniacally possessed mansion. However, most of the folks spend much of the film trying to rationalize and explain away the weird and malevolent happenings in the place. But when folks start getting tossed about like rag dolls and the place seems to have a mind of its own, the only reasonable explanation is evil!The film has a lot going for it. The ghosts look amazingly realistic and the stunts do as well. Plus, the film is more than just gore and death. Well worth seeing if you like horror flicks.

This film is brought to us by Roger Corman, and so it is a film that tries to capitalize on the success of a more known film, in this case Amityville. Like so many other Corman pictures, this film has an edge to it that makes it less boring than many other haunted house tales of this era. During the 70's, there were tons of haunted house movies that were either television films or were films that came to a theater. A lot of them were a big snooze. This one had something going for it, and had they did a bit more with the deaths and tacked on a better ending, I would consider this one a pretty good one. However, the deaths were all essentially the same with a couple of exceptions and the ending just came across as a bit wrong...in that it just did not feel like it belonged in the same movie I had been watching up to that point.The story has a couple purchasing a really big house that they are wanting to convert into a drug rehab center. However, there is something in the basement and soon the couple as well as some patients and a friend are locked within the house struggling to survive against an unseen force that seems determined to kill them all. They try to find a way out of the house, and the professor who bought the house will not acknowledge that the strange occurrences are supernatural in nature and is bound and determined to try to think things through logically, until enough things begin to happen that simply have no explanation.The movie has Richard Crenna in the lead role and he does okay. The problem is that it becomes a bit ridiculous at a certain point in the film that he is trying to figure out a logical explanation for what is going on. I watched a film called Vengeance of the Zombies where the police when presented with very little evidence that zombies were involved nearly instantly believed that it was zombies. Here it is the opposite. People are flying through the air, the doors and such in the house have locked everyone in and the professor suggests that it is a weather anomaly and someone else suggests static electricity! Speaking of electricity, there are way too many deaths involving electricity in this one. If only they were creative with the kills I would have given this one a higher score. That along with changing that out of left field ending.So the film had some moments to it and it was not boring, but it also failed in a lot of areas. The best death came near the end when this one guy got out of the house as I knew he was going to die, but it surprised me how he was killed. I have seen numerous other haunted house films over the years, though, and this one is not the worst of the bunch. With a bit of work, it might have been more of a cult hit, but as it is, it is probably just a forgettable film that was just a few things away from being memorable.

A daft, but entertainingly modest low-budget late 70s haunted house variation with horror comic lashings (intentional or not) in what becomes a traditional battle between good vs. evil. Nothing surprises, as no cliché is left untouched, but director Gus Trikonis' able execution is quite well done for what it is. Some creepy or outrageous moments and there's a solid cast led by the ever-reliable Richard Crenna, as he plays a psychologist along with his wife (a doctor) buy an abandon mansion (which does have something of a gloomy past) to hopefully restore to use as a clinic. So some friends and students of his go there to help fix it up, but unknowingly to them a devastating satanic force is unleashed and they find themselves trapped inside trying to survive.The raw atmospheric make-up emit's a dominating presence, from the grand vast secluded mansion to the eerily placed music score, imaginative camera placement and cue in the cackling evil laughter of the evil entity. It constructs an ominously nightmarish strangle-hold, as it grows claustrophobic but at the same time the whirlwind becomes a random schlock-fest with its climax being the tip of it. It's not as unnerving as it could have been and the ending it feebly done. The story dynamics are old-hat (a stormy night) and it's slow to get going with some plodding opening dialogues, but soon that's made way for impulsively staged deaths / encounters --- consisting of spirit manifestations, possessions, fires, self-mutilation and bodies being thrown about. When these strange occurrences transpire, it's even mentioned for no one to go anywhere on their own, but do they listen… of course not. The dedicated cast also features lively performances by Andrew Prine, Joanna Pettet, Cassie Yates and a memorable sequence with Victor Buono.