Prime Evil (1988)

just watch it!

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It took me several sittings, but I finally managed to finish "Prime Evil". Since I am a red-blooded, All American straight male, you wouldn't think that a movie that features so many gratuitous boobies would be that hard to get through, but, well, it was. Boobies can only get a viewer so far.It's pretty obvious that the acres of flesh on display here (and the kidnapping, subjugation and ritual murder of women)are the main point of the film, and I don't have a problem with that. (With a title like "Prime Evil", the movie can't be said to be proceeding under false pretenses, can it?) But the movie, it tasks me. It tasks me because the chief bad guy has just one expression and just one bit of stage business with his index finger on his lips for the entire movie, and the director lets him get away with it. It tasks me because the cast members are photogenic, but also brittle and wooden and bad at a level worse than most television day time soap operas. It tasks me because the screenplay cheats like a bastard and skips over even the basic demands of common sense. It tasks me because an "undercover nun" is able to stab the Devil to death, and the special FX for the Devil is a barbecued goat mannequin with bat-wings that looks as if someone didn't leave it on the rotisserie long enough. And it tasks me because the chief Satanist makes his escape gesticulating as if he were Snidely Whiplash.It tasks me because the police detectives who "crack" the case at the last minute do so in a scene staged by someone who never saw the inside of police station in their lives, and who have no idea what kind of handguns they carry on duty.(And no, you can't claim that this is a "parody" when the rest of the movie is played absolutely straight.) And that's just the first few things that came to mind, and I only have 1000 words or so,and I don't want to bore the casual reader as badly as this movie bored and irritated me.One extra star for all the boobies. Minus several stars for being a bad version of a soft core porn film without having a soft-core porn's entertainment value.

I'm somewhat surprised by the bad reviews here; only in that I would GUESS someone who took the time to WATCH "Prime Evil" might well LIKE "Prime Evil." But there you go.I think the film is somewhat better than that. Findley's film is clearly meant to be absurd and is mostly played for laughs. A good portion, if not all, of the silly humor works. William Beckwith is certainly game as a the head bad guy, and Christine Moore is a winning presence who helps you hang in there to the end. Therein lies the problem, the film wears out it's welcome by about half an hour, and the comic cops who bring up the rear are more tiresome than amusing. Maybe Findley though She needed a lot of padding between the knockers and stage blood, but the film overplays it's hand. Again, a lot of this plays like a parody of the devil worshiping cult film that goes way back to "The Black Cat", and if your into this kind of stuff at all you might enjoy "Prime Evil."

So there I was, standing in best buy with four DVDs in my hand trying to figure out which 'Grindhouse' double feature I'd buy. I looked on the back and was interested in the story of 'Prime Evil'. Sure enough, I bought the sucker. I got home and immediately put the DVD in to start watching. The first feature film 'Don't Answer The Phone' was awesome. A pure slasher flick with loads of nudity and gore. When 'Prime Evil'started, I was pleased. But by the end of the film, I was questioning why this movie was even considered to be part of the 'Grindhouse' dvds. There's little to no blood and the story d r a g g e d on and on until the 'climatic' end. BTW, the end is ANYTHING but climatic. I ~*~LOVE~*~ cheesy b-movies, but this one was so bad, its horrible.

I watched this as one of the movies in Rhino's Horrible Horrors Vol. 1 box set. While it wasn't entirely horrible, it was pretty poor.It starts off with some narration (which is absent for the rest of the movie), and a scene of a monk turning Satanist in the 1300s or something like that. Then in the present day, the death of a priest who was secretly a Satanist prompts a nun to go undercover to try to infiltrate the Satanists. She isn't given much to do for most of the movie, though.There's a young woman who had been abused by her father and a group of child pornographers who plans to get married. Apart from the sexual abuse as a child, she's never had sex. Her grandfather is one of the Satanists and plans to use her in a sacrifice. He would like to take over the group.There's also the Satanist's goon, who goes about like a slasher killing some people, abducting others. The cinematography and editing and so on aren't incompetent, but the acting and story are pretty lifeless. Surprisingly, there's no nudity. There's not a whole lot of blood, but there is some, and towards the end some people rapidly age or melt, I'm not sure.