NEW YEAR'S EVIL (1980)

Middle-of-the-road early 80's slasher that has a slow start, interesting middle and then lame ending.  The story is about a TV show personality who's hosting a New Year's Eve celebration program.  She gets a phone call on-air by some guy who calls himself "Evil" saying he's going to kill somebody each hour up until midnight and although he doesn't expressly say it, it's implied that he is going to kill her a midnight.  Being a professional, she plows ahead with the show as the useless cops try to track down the killer.

Low body count, lame off screen murders, piss poor nudity, amusing 80's fashions, interesting detour with a story about a biker gang, horrible music, non-threatening killer, the line: "Sally got rid of her nervous diarrhea.", anti-climatic ending, no unique or memorable characters, nice Los Angeles exterior locations.

Although I didn't dislike it, I can't see anybody other than slasher completist and/or lovers of bad movies getting much of a kick out of NEW YEAR'S EVIL.  And with so many better slashers from the same time period out there, I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it.

THE OMEGA MAN (1971)

Los Angeles 1977.  Two years ago, biological warfare between China and Russia created a "plague" that killed most of the earth's population.  Now the only thing that's left is a pack of monk robe wearing nocturnal albino-mutant dorks (The Family) and Charlton Heston.  The albino nerds hate modern technology and education, since they see it as the reason for the humans downfall, so they spend their nights rummaging around a deserted Los Angeles burning books and destroying stuff.  Charlton, on the other hand, seems to be about half insane and spends his time searching for The Family's hideout, talking to himself and rubbing his flabby chest.  That is until one day when Charlton sees another human...or did he?

The idea for THE OMEGA MAN is great and full of endless potential and who knows maybe back in 1971 this was seen as an awesome film, but watching it now it's totally weak.  The sets looked like TV show sets, there are multiple instances of human movement in the background during the daytime scenes, the camerawork was amateur to the point of being distracting, it's never explained if there are still animals or not, the Family hates Charlton and know where he lives but yet they can't seem to be able to destroy the building he lives in (hint: burn down the entire block!), heavy-handed messiah theme, Charlton Heston taking his shirt off to give us a full pectical spectacle( ...which, I guess, is better than him taking his pants off and giving us a testicle spectacle), terrible acting by the Family background actors, Charlton's horrible time-keeping skills, Charlton repeatedly lays his gun down and walks off...that said, I actually ended up liking the film.  It's just sooo cheesy that you can't help but smirk nearly the entire time.

Not really recommended for younger audience since they will probably just sit there confused at the dated stuff and the poor filmmaking, but curious older audiences will probably get a kick out of it.

Reflection of tree never moves the entire time the helicopter is supposedly spinning out of control.