by Keri O’Shea
Nothing, absolutely nothing, will make you want to see a film more than being told you can’t. This is a maxim which holds true now (some filmmakers seem to actively court the type of controversy which will get their film banned) and, back in the pre-DVD days, before you could spend five minutes browsing Amazon for all your grisly and perverse needs, it was the driving force behind the appeal of a hell of a lot of films. You only have to think about the Video Nasties legislation – of which this particular film fell foul – to realise that many of the films on the list would have sunk without trace had people not wanted to track them down to see what all the fuss was about. Rather later than the Video Nasties furore, though, a teenage girl growing up in a small town in the back of beyond got told about a friend of a friend who had a copy of a horror video that she needed to see…a film where a kid summons the Devil…
That film was Evilspeak, and I revisited it for the first time since around 1993 just the other day. What a difference nearly twenty years makes (and have I really been alive that long?) Stripped of the veneer of being a banned ’18’ film passed onto me by a suitably dodgy individual, it was a lot easier to see what was wrong with Evilspeak – namely, not very much happens for the bulk of the film, and the intriguing promise of the Esteban story doesn’t get developed as fully as I would like. But you know what? I still really enjoyed watching it again. Evilspeak is a quirky little movie with some refreshing ideas, most notably the notion of splicing up-to-date technology with ancient magic.
So many of these movies take fantastic set-ups to do one thing, though: let the little guy get revenge on the evil jock bastards who have made his life a living hell. Whatever supernatural being permits this, the fact that it keeps on cropping up as a theme is a seriously worrying indictment of the American school system: America, rein in your sports goons! Anyway, Stanley Coopersmith, played by Gentle Ben child actor Clint Howard, is one of the little guys – doing his utmost to succeed in the military academy he attends, and absolutely failing. Teachers and students alike seem to have a hard time with him, while Coopersmith has a hard time doing just about anything – arriving on time, not falling over, not fucking up on the sports field…the only thing he seems to enjoy is using his uber-clunky and old school (to us) home computer. So, he doesn’t make life very easy for himself, but then it’s ever likely he would have had a tough time anyway. Military Academies are not known for their tolerance, after all, and fallibility is not a desired characteristic. Put on cellar cleaning detail (!) for a transgression one day, Coopersmith finds a stash of occult paraphernalia, including a grimoire, which had belonged to the daemonic Esteban we see getting up to nefarious deeds at the start of the film, in a period sequence which more than holds its own with other period representations of cults on-screen. Hmm…so could the Devil be the answer to Coopersmith’s woes? Coopersmith begins inputting what he reads in the grimoire into his computer – where it seemingly takes on a life if its own. Dark forces are at work, and Coopersmith, pledging himself to Satan, is now their agent…
Considering that, now the internet is completely ubiquitous and held up by some as proof that society is going to hell in a handbasket, it is interesting to see this idea of technology = evil being used so long before computers were absolutely everywhere. In the early eighties, computers were only just becoming a familiar sight; the rise of the computer nerd was a relatively new thing, too. Coopersmith may have had a sizeable cohort had he existed in a later decade, but back at the very start of the eighties, things were a bit more clandestine, and the whole set-up must’ve seemed like a sort of necromancy to the uninitiated. It’s just him, his computer – and that mysterious book. The computer is literally transformed into a conduit of evil, complete with brilliantly eighties graphics when the machine starts giving the orders, such as compelling marauding pigs to attack the pesky librarian who tries to interfere in proceedings by trying to prize the precious stones from the grimoire’s cover, for example…
Yes, I did say ‘pigs’. Leaving aside the certainty held during this decade that all a woman had to do to be transformed into a ravishing beauty was to unpin her hair and take her glasses off, if she was wearing any, one of the things Evilspeak is chiefly remembered for is its pig attack scene. Now, I’ll agree: it’s a bloody strange sequence – but a terrible one? I don’t think so. As far as symbolic critters go, you can do worse than pigs. Goats are usually held to represent Satan thanks to their ‘carnal’ natures, but are they really more carnal than pigs? Nope, plus pigs are more intelligent and a fuck of a lot nastier – just ask Miss Friedemeyer, who meets a grisly end (just after a steamy shower, of course), many years before this particular species of animal marauded through the horror genre in a similarly nasty scene in Hannibal, twenty years later. For me, this is another facet of the film where director Eric Weston takes a chance on something rather innovative and manages it just fine. Also, goats wouldn’t have worked, cloven hooves or not…
As for the pay-off at the end of this film, where Coopersmith’s Satanic pretensions pay off, you’ve just got to love it. As I suggested, they make you wait…and wait…for any sort of conclusion, but for the last ten or fifteen minutes of Evilspeak you get a head-rolling, levitating, blood-splattering catharsis sequence which is a lot of fun to watch (and, thanks to the believability of the jock characters, especially after their final outrage against their classmate, you can really relax into hating them enough to enjoy their eventual comeuppance). Coopersmith does deserve his moment of revenge, and if 80% of the film’s budget seems to have been ploughed into one sequence, then so be it – you get your money’s worth. This film boasts one of the most over the top conclusions ever committed to celluloid.
Flawed, yes indeed, but Evilspeak (which was only passed uncut in the UK as recently as 2004) deserves the modest cult following it enjoys, for its imagination and moments of real excess, propped up as they are by decent performances, especially from Howard, who does deliver some real pathos in-between the more zany scenes. As an entrant in the Satansploitation genre, it checks a lot of boxes, and it adds one of its own; we have probably all suspected, at one time or another, that our damn computers are sentient, and Evilspeak is an early expression of that possibility. And, all before the worst CGI outrages found their way into film, as well!