On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length pace to honor marginal cinema in the streaming era.
First, read the BAIT: A strange and wonderful choice of any moment in the movie. So, try the BITE– A breakdown of the movie’s ending, the impact, and any other spoilers you want.
The Bait: A Low-Budget Party So Bad You’ll Feel Functionally Drunk
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: two British couples, an American tourist, and a guy named Spud walk into an abandoned hotel. Inside, “The Shining” meets “I Know What You Did Last Summer” meets “The Invisible Man” with just a hint of “Scooby Doo.” They are trapped there forever. The end.
Better constructed than that joke (but not by much!), director Norman J. Warren’s 1987 seasonal disaster makes no sense. However, it’s mostly set on New Year’s Eve, and it’s the perfect, low-effort watch to foreshadow whatever new hell awaits us in 2025. From a guy punching a hole in a woman’s stomach to jokes about “The Twilight Zone” so shoddy it could resurrect Rod Serling, “Bloody New Year” is about getting swept up in a D-movie situation that demands it. (Sound familiar?)
We enter a black and white home video with credits over it. It’s the last day of 1959 and guests at a massive hotel soirée conga their way into the next decade. As the jovial tones of a catchy song called “Recipe for Romance” float over the scene, color appears. Suddenly, a woman is dragged through a mirror, a moment marked by more fun He screams on this side of Wilhem’s scream, and the plot moves to the ’80s: a critical framing shift that is never made explicit.
Lovebirds Rick (Mark Powley) and Janet (Nikki Brooks) join their boyfriend and girlfriend Lesley (Suzy Aitchison) and Tom (Julian Ronnie) at a carnival on the seafront in South Wales. His friend named Papa (Colin Heywood) is single, but Spud wastes no time searching for damsel in distress Carol (Catherine Roman). The American girl is at the fun fair just to “kill some time,” but for reasons that will never be explained, she has become caught in a whirlwind by a group of bullies and a strangely complicit ride operator. While Lesley and Janet receive a strange prediction from a tarot card reader, Spud, Rick and Tom rescue Carol. Soon, the five friends are escaping into the ocean, a choice that seems smart on paper but on stage seems ridiculously inexplicable.
No good deed goes unpunished (wait, is it still a good deed if you do it to get laid?) and the group’s sailboat immediately sinks into the ocean. Luckily, they’re just a quick swim away from the Grand Island Hotel and the wreckage of a plane crash that doesn’t bother the group in the slightest. They’ll get a big exposition on the shipwreck later, but these beachgoers have plenty of other informational fish to fry before then. To begin with, how did they get back to the mainland? Does anyone still work at this hotel? It’s July, so why is the lobby decorated for… Christmas?
Titrated with both body fluids. and Taking British slang into account, “Bloody New Year” is a meaningless low-budget disaster that frequently drags on. It also has practical effects so ambitious that the final result resembles an absurd reel from cinema’s most sloppy amateur illusionist. The time travel plot is nothing to write home about, but screenwriter Frazer Pearce offers enough connective tissue to turn this stop-start journey through ghosts, zombies, and awkward dating dynamics into a semi-complete story.
The acting is atrocious and the editing is so meticulously bizarre that the philosophy could only be taught in the Bermuda Triangle. But even for all its baffling camerawork and wild tonal inconsistencies, this flooded catastrophe should not be missed. It is an all-time testament to total artistic commitment, even in the face of obvious problems that no one should have had. ever committed and an excuse to revel in the joy of work so ridiculous it starts to make more sense after midnight.
“Bloody New Year” is now streaming on Tubi.
The Bite: Those were probably some ideas you had there.
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IndieWire After Dark posts midnight movie recommendations every Friday night at 9:30 pm ET. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
