EVIL COME, EVIL GO (1972)

As the world of softcore began to crumble in the early seventies, it became more imperative for filmmakers to try and formulate some kind of a hook to make their projects worth the time to an audience who could just as well plunk down the same amount of money to see the real thing. For 1972’s Evil Come, Evil Go producer Bob Chinn and writer/director Walt Davis, both sidelined from making hardcore due to the heat the vice cops were applying to the Los Angeles adult film scene at the time, concocted a softcore sexploitation gore film based somewhat on Charles Laughton’s 1955 classic Night of the Hunter. The result is a pretty unique piece of drive-in/grindhouse fare with priceless dialogue, lovely period exteriors, and an eye-popping and fully-committed central performance by Cleo O’ Hara.

In Evil Come, Evil Go, demented street evangelist Sister Sara (O’ Hara) is on a mission to rid the world of pleasurable sex and evil men! As she makes her way across the desolation of the southwest, she beds down pickups and then immediately murders them in a fit of misandrist rage. Upon her arrival in L.A., she quickly finds a disciple in Penny, a well-to-do lesbian whose parents pay her off to stay away from them out of shame. Together, they hatch a full proof scheme in which Penny will lure the men and Sister Sara will kill and rob them, creating a river of bloodshed in the process.

In the grand scheme of things, Evil Come, Evil Go wasn’t the wildest film Walt Davis ever dreamed up as this was a man whose Widow Blue had Susan Wescott’s character fellate her dead husband as she was simultaneously having sex with Alex Elliot. All of this and in 1970, no less! However, Evil Come, Evil Go might be Davis’s crowning achievement due to Cleo O’ Hara’s performance which is just a buried treasure of pure camp waiting to be discovered by a wider audience. Acting with every facial muscle under her control, O’Hara digs in to every word and keeps trained on being fully in the moment. Many scenes depend on O’Hara’s ability to animate the screen as Davis preferred a static approach to his dialogue scenes. When she’s not in the frame, Evil Come, Evil Go can lose pace (the final coupling between Gerard Broulard and Jacqueline Lissette being the chief example) but, luckily, those moments are few and far between.

Evil Come, Evil Go succeeds as a wonderfully mad piece of exploitation not only because it has an ample amount of nudity and sex but also because it truly delivers on the violence and the gore. The film’s effects, furnished by assistant director John Holmes (of all people), may have been disgusting to deal with during production but they get the job done, evidenced in a bloodbath scene with Michael, the john from Beverly Hills (Harold Groves), but most especially in a series of shots that highlights a disemboweled Walt Davis splayed out on a bed after hooking up with Sara Jane in a bar (a scene that’s populated with quick-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos by Holmes and producer Bob Chinn). My kingdom to have seen this goddamn thing at a drive-in in 1972.

The film also sports some nice cinematography courtesy of Manny Conde that takes the audience up and down Hollywood Boulevard (it’s opening week for Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? at Grauman’s Chinese Theater!) to the crashing surf of the Pacific Ocean, while he murder sequences generally all occur in set-ups that are have some effectively moody lighting. The southwestern montage in the opening credits was actually shot by Chinn years prior and was repurposed to give the illusion of a larger landscape at play and Jim Wingert’s catchy, folky title tune would lead to his contributions to the soundtrack (and cast) for Chinn’s Panama Red the following year.

Walt Davis crafted sexploitation films to elevate the fun that could be had in them and the magic of his films is that they’re tailor-made for double bills. Just as the aforementioned Widow Blue skirts dangerously close to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope for a hot second, Oh! You Beautiful Doll, another David opus with Cleo O’Hara, would go well with a couple of cocktails and a warm up of Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. With its tale of a worthless grifter murdering people for her own gain while wrapped in a cloak of faith, the temptation would be to pair Evil Come, Evil Go with the Laughton classic that inspired it; but its overripe exploration of murderous rage against the male species would serve as a soothing cocktail to Monster, Patty Jenkins’s film from 2003 which more or less covers a lot of the same psychological territory as Davis’s film (but… you know… more seriously). Whatever the case, Evil Come, Evil Go works best if you stumble upon it unaware of what you’re getting into as it’s as difficult to anticipate the very unique blend of proto-slasher and sex film you’re going to get as it is to describe it. Whatever it is, we should all be extraordinarily glad it exists.

(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain