EDITOR’S NOTE: Forever Evil was on USA Up All Night on May 19, 1990;  December 6, 1991 and February 15, 1992.

Three couples party in a cabin; Holly (Diane Johnson) ends up dead in a shower, her stomach and baby torn out. Marc (Red Mitchell) is the only survivor of the red-eyed zombie and tree which attack the house as if this were Evil Dead. To make things worse, he gets hit by a car and ends up barely alive in a hospital.

There’s a tarot card reader named Brother Magnus, a psychic named Ben who looks just like him, a cop — Leo (Charles L. Trotter) — and a woman — Reggie (Tracey Huffman) — who survived a similar attack. A book entitled The Chronicles of Yog-Kothag and The Necronomicon. Mean dogs. Quasars. A date to The Jet Benny Show. A god trapped on a quasar. Nash (Howard Jacobson) is an evil real estate agent. A woman ripping a baby out of herself. Love confessions. Marc is becoming a zombie but fighting Nash. And by the end, the void and we hear Yog-Kothag.

Directed by Roger Evans, which explains Jet Benny being in this, as he made that movie, and written by Freeman Williams, who was Maggot in The Jet Benny Show and the voice of the preacher in Terror at Tenkiller, this is a delirious mess and I love it for that. It has dialogue like this, when Marc and Reggie try to kill the zombie:

Marc: Get the gas.

Reggie: But I hit it with the fucking car!

Marc: I got hit with the car once, I am still alive! Get the gas!

Shot with no sound and dubbed later, this has a dreamy quality and, because it’s on 16mm, appears grainy and imperfect. Diane Johnson was a close friend of the writer, and she was an exhibitionist, so that’s why she has so many nude scenes before she’s killed. She was fully nude for the close-up death scene, and sure, the camera only showed her from the chest up, but that’s how movies get made.

Shot in Houston, it features a hero who invents a grappling hook wrist device, like an even nerdier Peter Parker, before fighting a string-tie-wearing zombie. This was precisely what I needed today: something I’d never seen, that while kind of familiar, is just strange enough to keep me alive. Forever Evil!

You can watch this on YouTube.