Face-Off: Terror Train vs. New Year’s Evil

“The First Lady of Rock”, Blaze is so popular that she’s hosting a four hour New Year’s Eve celebration that’s being broadcast across the United States. For the men in her life, she’s a self-involved nightmare. She’s so uncaring toward her mentally disturbed son that he’s on the edge of succumbing to madness, and today her mentally disturbed husband Richard has officially lost his mind. He is fed up with the way Blaze treats him and their son, so as a way of lashing out at his wife he has decided that he’s going to kill someone as the clock strikes midnight in every American time zone, building up to the murder of Blaze at midnight on the west coast. NEW YEAR’S EVIL is a somewhat dopey B-movie, but there is some reality in the concept of a lunatic blaming a loved one for their problems and being driven over the edge into murder. Judging by the news, it seems to happen all the time.

Aside from when he kills Blaze’s publicist, Richard chooses his victims at random. A nurse who works at the sanitarium where he was once a patient, a couple women who were out clubbing, a member of a biker gang that chases him in my favorite sequence in the movie – a sequence in which the slasher becomes the potential victim on the run. There’s a suffocation and plenty of stabbings, but none of the kills really stand out as being particularly impressive.

Richard alters his appearance when he goes out for each kill, and actor Kip Niven’s face does lend itself to looking multiple different ways with simple changes. Sometimes he’s extremely creepy, then he’s a handsome orderly, then he transforms himself into a swinging disco clubber with a bad mustache, then he’s Blaze’s loving husband. At one point he dons a priest collar, at another he puts on an odd mask. If you knew Richard you’d probably see through his disguises, but it’s interesting to see how these different looks can affect Niven’s screen presence.

If you’re a fan of new wave rock music from the late ’70s/1980, the hotel ballroom that Blaze’s Hollywood Hotline show is being broadcast from would probably be a fun place to be, if not for the fact that there are some major jerks in the audience. The film really looks down upon the sort of people who are drawn to Blaze’s show, and thus this party doesn’t look like the most pleasant place to be.

For a man who wants to destroy his wife, Richard actually accomplishes very little toward this goal. The murder of her publicist does have an impact on Blaze, but otherwise he wastes his time with the random victims that she has no connection to. When Richard finally gets his shot at revenge in the climactic sequence, he manages to botch it by getting overly complicated. A common problem among killers in cinema.