Directed by Bernard Girard
Starring Robert Culp, Samantha Eggar and Sheila Sullivan
If you're looking for a horror movie to have a good, rollicking, MST3K-style time with a group of friends, look no further than A Name for Evil. Filmed in 1969 and sitting on studio shelves for four years under the idea that the fact that this was a movie that basically had no audience (a suspicion that turned out to be correct), this is a flick rife with funny editing moments, even funnier acting, and one of the most baffling narratives in the history of film. It's also the only movie in the history of humanity to feature Robert Culp being whisked away to a hippie orgy on a white horse. Spoiler alert.
PLOT: Culp (in the midst of his I Spy groovy period) stars as John Blake, swingin' architecht who has grown disenfranchised with the humdrum of his everyday life. Along with his semi-estranged wife (there's all sorts of issues between them that are never quite fleshed out), Blake takes off to the country to live in his grandfather's old house in the country. Commence usual series of haunted house movie cliches, only with a whole lot more far-out subtext. In some respects, this is actually a pretty deep film, and I've read my fair share of reviews online that delve into the hidden meanings and metaphors that a viewer can read into the plot. Supposedly, the idea is that Culp's character is looking to leave his wife, and a lot of the weirdness and debauchery that take place in the haunted house are manifestations of this. Or something. What we can actually see is a whole lot of unscary tedium involving shadows moving and mysterious caretakers.
PLOT RATING: * 1/2 out of ****.
CHARACTERS AND ACTORS: In addition to Culp, the movie features Samantha Eggar of The Brood and Curtains relative fame as his wife Joanna. This character is a bit of an annoying shrew, who views her husband as an overgrown man-child clinging to the hope that living in the country will reinvigorate their lives. There's also Sheila Sullivan (Culp's real-life wife at the time) as a smoking-hot local whom John Blake enjoys an extramarital tryst with in the aforementioned funniest orgy scene ever filmed. All three actors are actually pretty talented in their own right, but for whatever reason, they don't fit these characters in the least bit. In addition to that, John Blake is a pretty dislikable lead protagonist, and in addition to making fun of his suspect wardrobe you'll likely get a lot of milage out of his pouty dimeanor.
CHARACTERS AND ACTORS RATING: ** out of ****.
COOL FACTOR: Yikes. This isn't a very cool movie, and I'll just leave it at that. Not much in the way of cool death sequences - from what I can tell, there is only one death in this movie, and according to who you listen to it might not even officially take place. The less said about Culp's threads the better.
COOL FACTOR: 1/2 out of ****.
OVERALL: The reason that I found this movie to be such a great comedic goldmine, today and when I first saw it on AMC some late night back in 2006, is that it's a movie that never quite figures out what it wants to be. Sometimes, it's a middle-aged domestic drama. Sometimes, it's a Robert Wise-style haunted house film. And sometimes it's a pure 1969 anti-establishment credo. At any rate, while this movie is not very good at all, I nonetheless recommend it for pure masochism purposes. Take my word for it, the final 30 minutes or so of A Name for Evil has any latter day Adam Sandler film beat for pure laughs.
OVERALL RATING: * 1/2 out of ****, but if you've got a group of friends to watch and mock it with, bump that rating up significantly.
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