B-Sides: Rockin’ in 2013 with Some New Year’s Evil
Steve Barton
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This was supposed to be last weekend’s B-Sides, but I accidentally sent in the wrong file so you got another song from the Shocker soundtrack instead. Like that Wes Craven slasher, the soundtrack from which this weekend’s installment is taken is also a treasure trove of future B-Sides. So a belated New Year’s Evil rockin’ eve it is.
Cannon Films’ 1980 cult slasher favorite New Year’s Evil boasts a homicidal maniac who phones the lady rocker host of a New Year’s countdown show to let it be known he intends to murder someone each time the clock strikes midnight in a different time zone, and the last victim will almost certainly be her. Essentially, it’s the way you secretly deep down wish NBC’s New Year’s countdown show with Carson Daly would culminate. Well, it’s the way I wish it would end.
Since that killer’s modus operandi kind of limits the film’s body count a bit, that means there’s extra time to kill; and seeing as how it’s a movie built around a New Year’s countdown show, that means there is plenty of time for song and dance. And since New Year’s Evil is a time capsule of the punk rock-new wave music scene of the era, you can pretty much guess that unlike so many “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” shows of the same time period, the musical stylings of Barry Manilow do not comprise the soundtrack.
Much of the music comes from an actual band named Shadow. The odd thing about Shadow is that their music sounds far more like a Seventies metal band than the Eighties punk rock and new wave the film promotes. Ah, who cares? It’s 1980 and the top act on a New Year’s countdown show isn’t Manilow, The Gap Band, or The Oak Ridge Boys. “New Year’s Evil” by Shadow it is.
Happy 2013!
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Categorized:B-Sides
