Bloody New Year (1987)

After decades of living in our digital streaming future, it’s hard to remember what it was like to go into a video store to peruse the aisles, picking up potential movies, reading the back cover, getting disgusted when the one you wanted to rent is already checked out. The cover to Bloody New Year gives me flashbacks to those experiences in the Blockbuster of my childhood; it’s such a brilliant and memorable cover that I’m not surprised it was burnt into memory. At the same time, I never rented the movie, partly because I assumed it was just another slasher and partly because that skull having eyes really creeped me out.

That cover tho! The skeleton looks pretty jolly, even with the creepy eyes.

This review is a tad late for New Year’s, but then Bloody New Year isn’t really set at New Year’s: it starts in the middle of July, when five Welsh teenagers are hanging out at a seaside funfair. One of them, a young lad with the charming name of Spud, wanders off to find himself a ladyfriend, and finds an American tourist named Carol getting harassed by some thugs who’ve trapped her on a spinning teacup ride. Spud and his buds wade in to save Carol, fleeing through a haunted house before driving off to go sailing.

Alas, Spud picks up cute tourists better than he steers sailboats, and he runs aground on some rocks; with the yacht capsized, the teens find themselves shipwrecked on Grand Island. Seeking shelter, they stumble upon the Grand Island Hotel – strangely decorated for a New Year’s party, with a Christmas tree up in the lobby. Searching for staff and the circuit breakers, the teens find that the hotel seems to be stuck in 1959 as supernatural happenings begin to follow their every move. Things really start to heat up when the malicious carnies from the funfair appear on the island and enter the fray.

You know how certain action movies are compared to Die Hard as “Die Hard on an ___” (e.g. Die Hard on a bus, Die Hard on a plane, Die Hard at an airport, etc.)? Watching this movie made me realize horror should have its own equivalent comparison, since Bloody New Year is roughly “Evil Dead in a hotel.” Halfway through I decided I was only somewhat correct: this is more like a British version of the Italian La Casa films, a group of unrelated movies formed into a series by the way each entry takes the Italian title to Evil Dead and tacks a larger number on at the end. I have a soft spot for the La Casa films even though I have to admit they can be dull as dishwater. It doesn’t help that none of the La Casa soundtracks have any bops like this film’s infectious “Recipe For Romance” or other 50s-inspired songs (also, yet another case of the ‘80s fawning over the ‘50s).

Bloody New Year turns into a carnival funhouse ride in a haunted/possessed house where the characters are often attacked by everyday hotel objects and fixtures, often increasing in randomness or how illogical they are. Take, for example, the scene where the kitchen fixtures and cookware destroy themselves, only to be miraculously repaired through the power of reversing footage taken from other camera angles. Those who die on the island rise up as half-melted zombie things that are more than a little reminiscent of Evil Dead’s deadites, not so much resurrected by demonic forces as trapped in stasis or limbo. The movie’s explanation for these unnatural occurrences is a governmental experiment gone wrong that created some kind of time distortion field, which explains why everything from 1959 is so well preserved but not exactly why the hotel is haunted and vaguely sentient.

Director Norman J. Warren made a trio of solid horror flicks in the 1970s — Satan’s Slave, Terror, and Prey — but Bloody New Year feels almost half-hearted in comparison. There are good reasons for that; apparently the film was a nightmare for Warren, saddled with producers who didn’t understand horror and wanted everything done as fast and cheaply as possible. By the end of filming, Bloody New Year had become such a miserable experience that a disheartened Warren left the film industry.

The Bottom Line

This really is something of a funhouse ride, you have to just sit back and let it take you through a lot of “what the hell is going on here” confusion, a bit of goofiness, and a handful of scares. There are a lot of cheesy, goofy elements to Bloody New Year that make it enjoyably ridiculous, but its scares are pretty slight and insubstantial for a late-80s horror flick. It’s probably for the best that I never watched this as a kid, because I probably would have found it too slow, too confusing, not scary, and not graphic enough. I probably have more patience and appreciation for what Warren was trying to do here as an adult, even if he wasn’t able to fully realize that vision, thus I found it something of a mixed bag.

At least I’ll always have memories of that VHS cover leering at me in Blockbuster, though.

Rating: one thumb up, one thumb down

Content Warning: moderate gore, mild jumpscares, mild allusions to sex, one of the swears