A horror tale in the supernatural realm, 1981’s Fear No Evil starts with a prologue set in 1963. Catholic priest Father Damon (John Holland) manages to kill a maniac who claims he’s actually Lucifer.

This nutbag also states he’ll return from the dead, and it appears this might be true when Andrew Williams is born a few months later. His father (Barry Cooper) suspects something’s up with his boy, and Andrew (Stefan Arngrim) turns into a withdrawn, awkward high school senior.

Eventually Andrew starts to display his powers. In response, archangels Mikhail (Elizabeth Hoffman) and Gabrielle (Kathleen Rowe McAllen) take on human form to fight the resilient anti-Christ.

Would Evil exist without the success of The Omen five years earlier? Probably not – while the 1976 hit didn’t invent the notion of the Satanic kid, it remains arguably the genre’s defining film, and it clearly remained in the public mind circa 1981.

Omen never did a lot for me, but compared to Evil, it looks like genius. Uninspired and derivative, Evil flops in virtually all regards.

When I say “derivative”, I mean barely a minute of the movie passes without obvious nods to influences. In addition to Omen, we can find plenty of remnants from Exorcist, Carrie and even that Twilight Zone with Billy Mumy.

Even if I ignore the movie’s lack of originality, Evil seems persistently amateurish. Virtually every role suffers from overacting, and the performers take their scenery-chewing to comic extremes at times.

The movie barely attempts a plot, as instead it gives us a rambling, meandering tale. Evil spends bizarre amounts of screentime with tangential roles, and it’ll also often grind to a halt to provide clunky exposition.

Little proceeds in a logical manner. The story often works like someone took a script, threw it in the air and reassembled the pages at random.

We also find scenes that make no sense in the real world, with an apparently notorious shower sequence the biggest culprit. In this segment, some boys taunt Andrew, and this ends with their leader and Andrew stuck in a kiss.

Unless I missed something, the main boy intentionally smooches Andrew as part of the humiliating prank. I find it awfully tough to imagine a logical scenario in which one naked heterosexual teen male decides to suck face with another naked male, no matter what the motivation. The ridiculousness of the scene makes it nuts.

Worse than all, Evil just seems boring most of the time. We find little tension or terror, as instead, the film tends to feel listless.

Evil does come with a shockingly good soundtrack, though, as it presents tracks from Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Sex Pistols, Boomtown Rats, and Ramones. Unfortunately, the awful title song by some flop band called “Trybe” ends the flick’s soundtrack on a downer, but I still must give props to the movie’s music supervisor.

If one exists, I can endorse a purchase of the soundtrack album to Fear No Evil. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend the movie itself, as it provides silly, overwrought cheese.

Fear No Evil appears in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1 on this Blu-ray Disc. This wasn’t a bad image given its age, but it never became especially appealing.

Sharpness was probably the weakest link. Parts of the film showed reasonable delineation, but a lot of it came across as soft and bland.

No issues with jaggies or shimmering occurred, and I saw no edge haloes. Outside of a couple small specks, print flaws were absent, though the image felt abnormally grainy.

Colors were adequate. Though the hues lacked great vivacity, they showed passable clarity.

Blacks were reasonably dark, and shadows presented acceptable smoothness. Nothing here seemed better than average.

As for the movie’s DTS-HD MA monaural soundtrack, it also felt acceptable for its age. Speech appeared a little reedy and thin, but the lines showed good intelligibility and lacked overt flaws, though some bad looping occurred. Music demonstrated limited range as well and lacked much pep along with some shrill tones.

Effects fell into the same range. Outside of the horror bits, the track didn’t ask for much, and the elements sounded decent. They could be somewhat flat but they showed only a little distortion and represented the material well enough. All of this left us with a “C” soundtrack.

As we shift to supplements, we open with an audio commentary from actor Stefan Arngrim. Along with moderator Justin Beahm, Arngrim offers a running look at his career and aspects of the Evil.

Though the track occasionally goes screen-specific, it mostly feels more like a long interview than a commentary focused on the film. For the most part, this doesn’t become an issue.

Arngrim proves to be an engaging, chatty subject. He gets into a mix of topics with an honest approach that makes this an enjoyable discussion, even if I wish it stuck closer to the film as it progressed.

In addition, we get a separate Interview with Stefan Arngrim. During this 37-minute, 12-second piece, he talks about his life and career as well as his time on Fear.

It seems kind of odd to add a separate interview when we already get a commentary from Arngrim. Much of the interview repeats material from that track, so it tends to feel redundant.

Next comes a 28-minute, 23-second Interview with Special Effects Coordinator John Eggett. He covers his interest in his field and his work in movies, with some emphasis on Fear.

Like the Arngrim chat, this one lasts too long and goes onto too many tangential domains. It’s a decent interview overall, though.

In addition to a trailer and seven TV spots, we find an Image Gallery. It presents 48 frames that mostly focus on publicity elements. It’s a fairly good compilation.

Outside of a terrific collection of then-current rock songs on its soundtrack, Fear No Evil flops in all imaginable ways. Idiotic, boring and amateurish, nothing about it succeeds. The Blu-ray comes with mediocre picture and audio as well as a few decent supplements. Avoid this awful horror flick.