(Streamed via American Horrors)
Evil Town had a long, painful, strange production. It was started in 1973 under the direction of Curtis (L.A. Confidential) Hanson. He wound up getting fired and replaced by the producers (Death Game’s Peter Traynor and Larry Spiegel). Production was eventually halted due to lawsuits and the film wasn’t completed until the mid ‘80s by producer Mardi Rustam (who added a bunch more nudity to make it commercially viable).
The results are far from seamless. Then again, the seams are expected when a film took fourteen years and four directors to finish. The plot threads are all over the place. There are two families camping whose car breaks down in the titular town. We also have two horny gas station attendants who like to sneak off and rape coeds. Then, there’s also the matter of a nuthouse where a sexy doctor is performing illicit experiments on her patients.
You can probably guess what’s going on, thanks to the fact that the town is mostly populated by old people. Yes, they are luring young folks into town and performing experiments on them in order to prolong their life. Although it’s pretty obvious, the shoddy new scenes kind of make the whole thing kind of confusing.
Incredibly enough, there are some name stars in the cast. James Keach and Robert Walker, Jr. are the paternal figures taking their family camping, and poor old Dean Jagger (in his final role) is the head mad scientist behind the insidious plot. Sadly, he makes the whole thing even harder to watch as he is noticeably frail, often looks as if he is in pain, and flubs his lines a lot.
Yes, Evil Town is a fucking mess. The film stock, hairstyles, fashions, and cast changes often. The various plots feel like they were stuffed into an UNO Attack game and then spit out at random. The overuse of slow motion in some scenes is downright laughable too, but I’m sure it helped the distributors pad out the running time. At least there is a lot of T & A.
despite this films chaotic production I found it pretty interesting.
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