On a sixteenth-century beach, an excommunicated Spanish priest conducts a Black Mass and beheads a peasant girl as an offering. Centuries later, an orphaned cadet types the priest’s Latin writings into a school computer’s translation program to see what happens.

EVILSPEAK (1981) stars Clint Howard as Stanley Coopersmith, an orphan at West Andover Military Academy, mistreated by his teachers, coach, colonel, and the reverend, and bullied by his classmates. He has a friend in fellow cadet Kowalski, played by Haywood Nelson, and the school cook treats him kindly, but it isn’t enough to spare him. He discovers a hidden chamber beneath the academy chapel containing the writings of Father Lorenzo Esteban, played in the prologue by Richard Moll. The computer translates the text, and the text answers back.

Pigs in the sty attack Stanley when a secretary pries up the pentagram, a pack of demonic boars kills her and later the cadets, and a teacher is sacrificed in the catacombs for his blood before the chapel becomes the site of a massacre during a service.

Director Eric Weston, working from a script he co-wrote with Joseph Garofalo, pushes the revenge-fantasy formula into outright splatter. The climax puts Coopersmith in the air, levitating through a burning chapel with a sword, Esteban’s soul wearing his body like a glove.