976-EVIL 2 Reviews

There must have been someone looking forward to a sequel to 976-EVIL, but even those who were turned on by the Robert Englund-directed tale of telephone terror will likely find this a wrong number. Englund wisely sat out this needless follow-up, which strives mightily to make a connection with the original. That nasty phone line to hell returns, as does hero Spike (Patrick O'Bryan), who traces the evil calls to a college town where one Professor Grubeck (Rene Assa) has been using the nasty number's powers to murderous ends. Once upon a time he was just your garden-variety serial killer; the movie's opening sequence features one of his murders, complete with a shower scene, dumb homages to Roger Corman and Joe Bob Briggs, and a screaming female victim who lies patiently waiting for Grubeck to drop a lethal spike into her body. Arrested for his crimes, Grubeck puts to use the powers of astral projection he's gained from the beyond, his spirit detaching from his body to wreak more havoc. The first to go is the janitor who witnessed Grubeck's most recent murder, leading to his arrest; the villain's spirit appears in the motel where the old man's been sequestered and drags him onto the highway, where he's spectacularly splattered by an 18-wheeler. Though the punchline is an admittedly startling moment, the scene as a whole serves to point up the fact early on that director Jim Wynorski and screenwriter Eric Anjou never set up any plausible rules for Grubeck to follow. He simply turns up wherever he wants and does whatever he wants, sometimes an intangible spirit and sometimes a solid body, usually spewing out sub-Freddy one-liners. The major subplot concerns Robin (Debbie James), a college coed with whom Grubeck was obsessed and who is now pursued by his projected spirit. The possibilities for him to really get inside her are ignored, however, in favor of a lot of scenes in which Grubeck kills her friends and others to try to get her attention. Meanwhile, Spike attempts to put a stop to Grubeck's reign of terror before Robin can fall victim to his murderous advances. At one point, he breaks into Grubeck's old office, whereupon a malevolent--and unexplained--force causes its inanimate objects to fly to life. Later, he goes to an occult bookstore, where the strange proprietor (Brigitte Nielsen, in a brief but much-touted cameo) helps clue him in as to what is going on. It all ends up with a confrontation between our heroes and Grubeck, with an annoying twist ending topping the package off. Like most of director Jim Wynorski's (TRANSYLVANIA TWIST, THE HAUNTING OF MORELLA) work, 976-EVIL II attempts to blend horror and comedy elements, and only comes close to succeeding in a few instances. One of these is an amusing but protracted sequence in which Robin's friend Paula (Leslie Ryan) is sucked into a TV set showing IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, whose characters then turn into zombies from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and attack her. Unfortunately, the scene makes no sense in context; it's only in there because the filmmakers thought it would be a neat idea. 976-EVIL II never builds any real scares or tension; the actors are generally mediocre, and Zoran Hochstatter's photography has the floodlit, unatmospherically slick look of a quickie production. The only really creditable element of the film is some fine car-crash material by the gifted low-budget stunt specialist Spiro Razatos, whose fine work, ironically, only serves to underscore how lacking the rest of 976-EVIL II is. (Excessive violence, profanity, nudity.)