FEAR NO EVIL (1981) Blu-ray
Director: Frank LaLoggia
Scream Factory/Shout! Factory

The 1981 class of Alexandra High is really going to hell in the eighties punk/gothic Antichrist hybrid horror flick FEAR NO EVIL, on Blu-ray from Scream Factory.

Three angels – Raphael, Mikhail, and Gabriel – have been sent to Earth to end Satan's reign of terror and pave the way for the Second Coming; however, their human incarnations can only defeat Satan together and Raphael and Mikhail have been incarnated as Father Thomas Damon (John Holland, CHINATOWN) and his sister Margaret (STARGATE SG-1's Elizabeth Hoffman), but they have lost track of Gabriel. Father Damon pursues the current incarnation of Satan in the form of wealthy Rosario Bonamo (Richard Jay Silverthorn) to the temple he has erected in the form of a castle on Lawrence Bay which was abandoned during construction when several of the workers vanished and were believed to be buried on the island. Father Damon kills Bonamo knowing he will be reborn in order to allow for more time in which to find Gabriel. Damon is judged insane and dies in an asylum while Margaret becomes a social outcast when she testifies at his trial that it was she who told him to Bonamo was Satan. That same year, Andrew Williams is born, but his disastrous Christening is the first sign of trouble and the relationship between his parents Greg (Barry Cooper, THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA) and Marion (Alice Sachs) erodes into violence that culminates on his eighteenth birthday. Always a loner, hated by his father, feared by his otherwise doting mother, and ostracized because of his good grades, Andrew (LAND OF THE GIANTS' Stefan Arngrim) is coming into his own as the Antichrist, going from unconsciously projecting his anger with telekinesis – onto the likes of bully Tony DeVito (Daniel Eden, ST. ELMO'S FIRE), his authoritarian coach (Richard Jay Silverthorn), and even poor Mark (Paul Haber), the boyfriend of classmate Julie (ALL MY CHILDREN's Kathleen Rowe McAllen) who has been having strange nightmares of incubal rape featuring Andrew – to recreating Bonomo's blasphemous shrine at the castle on the night the town gathers for an elaborate production of the Passion Play and Andrew's classmates head to the island to drink and party.

What looks on the surface like a mishmash of THE OMEN (more so DAMIEN: OMEN II) and CARRIE, FEAR NO EVIL seems to have incorporated those elements for the sake of commerciality but underneath the film is as much a seriously Catholic horror story as ALICE, SWEET ALICE. Director Frank LaLoggia – who also wrote the film and composed the score which given orchestral embellishment by David Spear (EXTERMINATOR 2) – hangs exploitation elements like homoerotic bullying, rape, some freak deaths, and even zombies upon his story rather than the other way around. The weakness of the film is the same as the aforementioned OMEN sequel as Andrew transitions too abruptly from being horrified at his own supernatural powers to embracing them fully – it is possible that some tragic second act event might have been snipped by distributor Avco Embassy who recut the film and added New Wave and Punk cues by The Ramones, Sex Pistols, Richard Hell, The B-52's, and Talking Heads – but the havoc wreaked on the Passion Play during Andrew's simultaneous sacrificial consecration of his temple is an effective sequence (one that also anticipates the gorier, smaller scale climax of the later EVILSPEAK). The photography of Frederic Goodich is effectively gothic with plenty of blue gels, backlighting, smoke, and canted angles, but the real star of the film is Castle Boldt on Heart Island in the St. Lawrence River, then is a state of ruin but since then fully restored and now a tourist and wedding venue. Determined to go it alone, actually with his cousin Charles, LaLoggia would take another seven years to mount a feature, and it was the ambitious and surprisingly slick LADY IN WHITE. His last film to date, MOTHER/THE HAUNTED HEART is not so well-known. LaLoggia effectively retired from the business as a director and moved to Tuscany but has recently had a relatively large speaking role in the English-language Italian horror film H.P. LOVECRAFT'S TWO LEFT ARMS which appears from the trailer to be a mash-up of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos and Pupi Avati's THE HOUSE WITH THE LAUGHING WINDOWS.

After its theatrical release, FEAR NO EVIL became a video rental shelf mainstay with an early eighties Embassy VHS and a Hi-Fi reissue in the late eighties (the former reproducing Avco Embassy's striking ad campaign). The film was one of the Avco Embassy titles that went to Studio Canal rather than MGM and arrived on VHS in 2003 with an anamorphic transfer, 5.1 remix of the original mono track, behind the scenes footage, and a commentary by LaLoggia and cinematographer Frederic Goodich. Sadly, none of those extras have been carried over to Shout Factory's Blu-ray (reportedly LaLoggia refused to have any involvement in the release). The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen encode comes from a new 4K master. The film always had a rather soft look deliberately, but the HD transfer does wonders from many low-lit and smokey backlit shots. The first fifteen to twenty minutes of the film have rather muted colors by design while the high school scenes boast more saturated colors in wardrobe and bloodshed, and textures come into higher relief even when the lighting is still moody and diffused. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track is fine for the mix as it is. Dialogue is clear, effects can be bold, and LaLoggia's scoring is effectively rendered. On the other hand, the songs sound a bit underpowered whether they are recessed in the mix or underlining the closing credits. When Avco spent the money on the song licensing, they really should have sprung for a Dolby Stereo mix with more aggressive mixing of the songs (imagine Sex Pistol's "Antichrist" bellowed out). Optional English SDH subtitles are included with some errors (Tony becomes "Tommy" during the climax).

In place of the Anchor Bay extras, Scream Factory and Justin Beahm's Reverend Entertainment have created a handful of new extras. First up is a commentary by actor Arngrim moderated by Beahm in which the note the influences of not only various Antichrist-themed films but also George Romero's MARTIN. Arngrim discusses trying to empathize with his character, interacting with his co-stars – including Eden with whom he had to do his nude kissing scene on the first day of shooting, and McAllen who he felt was intimidated by him – as well as discussing the Castle Boldt location, some of the film's effects and latex make-up, and revealing that the zombie scene was whipped up with Silverthorn making up grips and gaffers as the resurrected island workers when the original effect which had Andrew walking across the water to the Passion Play did not work out.

Arngrim also appears in a video interview with actor Arngrim (37:12) that focuses much of its time on the actor's other works, from his beginnings as a child actor including some live television, a guest role in GUNSMOKE to LAND OF THE GIANTS, with somewhat of a recap of his commentary anecdotes better illustrated by clips. The interview with special effects coordinator John Eggett (28:23) cover his childhood interest in pyrotechnics and how that developed professionally with stage shows and some minor credits – including how a bit as an extra on the locally-shot RAID ON ENTEBBE lead to him working behind the scenes too on effects – to meeting LaLoggia and how the director's jack-of-all-trades quality on the film lead him to be more ambitious with what they could achieve with effects on the budget (his effects also extended to generating smoke to aid the moodiness of Goodich's lighting in regular scenes as well as some scenes making use of in-camera effects. The disc also includes the film's theatrical trailer (0:39), TV spots (3:34), and an image gallery (3:36). (Eric Cotenas)

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