This is an updated version of a review that was originally published in Bleeding Skull! A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey.
A skater named Todd Cook gets some major air off of a tiny ramp in slow motion. Cook sits down on a curb and says, “Seems like when I’m pumped, I can do ANYTHING!” I believe him. Because Cook pulls even more sick vert in slow motion for the next four minutes, which also happen to be the first four minutes of his debut movie, Evil Night.
This is just another reason why I would follow Todd Cook to the end of the solar system.
Jimmy is an ultra-nerd in high school. He looks like he’s 32 years old, his clothes are too tight, and a bully dumps Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup on his head. The bully isn’t wearing a Slayer shirt, or even a Metallica shirt. He’s wearing a Pearl Jam shirt. Nothing is more embarrassing than getting bullied by a kid wearing a Pearl Jam shirt. Jimmy is invited to a party. Once there, he is tormented by cool kids wearing rubber monster masks. Like every party prank unleashed in a slasher, from Terror Train to Slaughter High, it all goes horribly wrong. Someone hits Jimmy with a rock, and he is left for dead.
But Jimmy is alive! AND HE IS STOKED TO KILL! Jimmy drinks a magic potion, gains telekinetic powers, and puts on a clown mask while saying, “Wait’ll they get a load of my shit!” in the style of Jack Nicholson as the Joker from Batman. In seventh grade, I gave a speech about “The Scarlet Letter” in English class “in the style of Jack Nicholson.” I thought it would give me an edge over my classmates. It did, and I got a D+.
At this point, Evil Night becomes exactly what everyone wants it to be. And that is a SOV clown slasher where someone gets sodomized by a mop while Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” plays on a boom box. At the same time, the movie becomes exactly what no one wants it to be. And that is a SOV clown slasher where Todd Cook has unflattering sex with Lisa, his forgiving wife, before sitting on a toilet and taking a shit. Basically, Evil Night is Cook’s greatest accomplishment.
As the 1990s went on, Cook’s creative path had a lot in common with the work of David “The Rock” Nelson. Both filmmakers started out by producing ultra-no-fi SOV tributes to their favorite horror icons that almost resembled actual movies. Nelson’s Conrad Brooks vs. the Werewolf told a story that could have been written by a 4-year-old or an 89-year-old, but it still made sense. The same goes for Evil Night. But like Nelson in Des Plaines, Illinois, Cook eventually used movies as a means to document mundane, repetitive happenings in and around his house in Missouri City, Texas. I make sandwiches every day. But that doesn’t mean I want to watch Todd Cook make a sandwich. Or watch his camera zoom in and out on his wife’s crotch for two minutes. Over the course of 10 years, Cook’s self-released tapes on his Cemetery Cinema label (Night of the Clown, Lisa’s Nightmares) devolved into nothingness. It truly felt like they were made for no one but Cook himself.
Evil Night takes the best of Todd Cook’s good intentions and mashes them together into a 74-minute scrambler of cartoonish ultra-violence, uneventful documentation, and second-generation analog static. A parade of jocks, horror nerds, stoners, and mall punks are destroyed by Jimmy the Clown via lawn sprinkler, a Chevy Lumina sunroof, and floating knives. People smoke weed. We get a tour of Cook’s bedroom, which features a shrine to Jason Voorhees, Star Wars bedsheets, and a VHS copy of Dead Meat. The alt-metal soundtrack, which sounds like an unwanted basement collaboration between Depeche Mode and Megadeth, is really Cook recording under the fake band names Stage Dive and Nytemayre. Evil Night ends with a credit that reads, “Special thank [sic] to God.”
Today, every detail of this movie works toward one goal: To capture the flame of youth, fun, and naiveté before it is slowly extinguished by real-world responsibilities. Because of this, and the fact that Cook achieved a balance between mayhem and tedium, watching Evil Night is as fascinating as watching Todd Haynes and Cynthia Schneider’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which was cast entirely with Barbie dolls. That’s saying a lot.
