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Evil Lives (1992) Starring Tristan Rogers, Arabella Holzbog, Tyrone Power Jr., Sonia Curtis, Griffin O'Neal, Gianna Rains, Reed Hollister, David Pesko, Melissa Moore, Anne Betancourt, Paul Ben-Victor, Wendy Barry, Cherie Michan, Paul Bartel, Dawn Wells, Julie Strain, Leslie Sachs, Kim Green, David Sherril, Ted Fox, Kelli Potter, Kurt Meyers, Rick Jacobson, Wellington Glock, Anne Marie Ward.

Directed by Thunder Levin.

Running time: 82 minutes

Rating: R (Nudity and Sexuality)

"It's fiction folks, FICTION! Good old-fashioned, plain storytelling."

Mysterious horror novelist Richard Wayborn (Rogers) does a book tour lecturing on college campuses. His real motive (other than the obscene amount of money touring lecturers can get these days) is to seduce attractive young college girls and then murder them via poisoning.

Whenever he does, the spirit of his late wife Rachel (after 670 years of marriage) possesses the bodies and they can be together once again generally just for candlelit dinners and fleeting trysts in "no-tell motels". When the corpse begins to decay he and his wife's spirit make it look like a suicide and she goes away again until he can find another body to host her.

One of his most irritating victims is Sara Foster, a business student with a unique immune system who survives his attempt at poisoning her and goes directly to the police who don't believe her. No one else including her cop ex-boyfriend Scott (Tyrone Power Jr.) believes her either. But that is not her only worry. Wayborn and his wife both intend to kill her and she must contend with the author and the wife (in various host bodies) trying to finish her off.

Tasteless and garish? Without question! But it is also whimsical, intriguing and romantic in a very, very bizarre kind of way. I say bizarre because that is what necrophilia is. Make no mistake about it. Wayborn may be making love to his wife's spirit inhabiting corpses but they are still corpses and thus are a form of zombie (I think). I'm open minded about a lot of things but not sex with corpses.

What I am open minded about are film productions which try to do something a little different and at the very least attempt to carve out their own niche as this one does.

With all the holes in the plot the most glaring one is this concept that a marriage could last 670 years. In Hollywood, where marriages often don't last 670 days I can't imagine how someone could have conceived of something like that. To their credit the writers do conjure up 670

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