What do you get when you combine the plot of a bad ’50s sci-fi alien invasion movie with the visual aesthetics of a backyard slasher film and add just a dash of early-’80s porno sensibility? A terrible mess, naturally, but a strangely compelling mess for those not overly offended by others’ incompetence.
Evils of the Night features John Carradine, Julie Newmar and Tina Louise as alien doctors sent to our world to harvest “platelets” from healthy teenagers in order to help keep their population young beyond their years (which leads us to believe that Carradine must be a million years old by this point).
Despite their noble attempts to harvest these platelets without killing their unwilling donors, many of the kids die as a result of the harsh methods employed by their chief kidnappers, two mentally deficient mechanics (Neville Brand and Aldo Ray). The fact that we don’t actually care if any of these kids survive does have a somewhat negative impact on the movie’s overall tension.
Its brief running time is padded with a couple of spliced-in softcore interludes featuring well-known era porn stars Crystal Breeze, Amber Lynn and Jerry Butler, which — along with the minimal clothing worn by most of the female cast — makes the movie feel far sleazier than its plot requires. By the end, the (unintentional) joke does wear thin and it becomes hard to resist the temptation of your fast-forward button, but until then, Evils of the Night is just too awful for any bad movie fan to resist. —Allan Mott