On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
First, read the BAIT: a weird and wonderful pick from any time in film. Then, try the BITE: a breakdown of the movie’s ending, impact, and any other spoilers you’d want.
The Bait: A Low-Budget Party So Bad You’ll Feel Functionally Drunk
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Two British couples, an American tourist, and some dude named Spud walk into an abandoned hotel. Inside, it’s “The Shining” meets “I Know What You Did Last Summer” meets “The Invisible Man” with just a dash of “Scooby Doo!” They’re trapped there forever. The end.
Better constructed than that joke (but not by much!), director Norman J. Warren’s seasonal disasterpiece from 1987 makes no sense. It is, however, mostly set on New Year’s Eve — and the perfect low-effort watch for ringing in whatever fresh hell awaits us in 2025. From a guy punching a hole through a woman’s stomach to “Twilight Zone” gags so shoddy they could resurrect Rod Serling, “Bloody New Year” is about going with the flow in a D-movie situation that demands it. (Sound familiar?)
We enter into a black-and-white home video with credits laid over top. It’s the last day of 1959 and guests at a massive hotel soirée are conga-ing their way into the next decade. As the jovial tones of a catchy track called “Recipe for Romance” waft over the scene, the color pops through. Suddenly, a woman is yanked through a mirror — a moment punctuated by the funniest shriek this side of the Wilhem scream — and the plot is pulled into the ’80s: a critical framing shift that’s never once made explicit.
Lovebirds Rick (Mark Powley) and Janet (Nikki Brooks) join fellow boyfriend-girlfriend Lesley (Suzy Aitchison) and Tom (Julian Ronnie) at a boardwalk carnival in South Wales. Their potato-named friend (Colin Heywood) is single, but Spud wastes no time finding damsel in distress Carol (Catherine Roman). The American girl is at the fun fair just to “kill a little time,” but for reasons that will never be explained, she’s been trapped on a tilt-a-whirl by a bunch of thugs and one weirdly complicit ride operator. While Lesley and Janet are getting a strange prediction from a tarot card reader, it’s Spud, Rick, and Tom to Carol’s rescue. Soon, all five friends are making their escape into the ocean — a choice that seems smart on paper but in the scene reads as laughably inexplicable.
No good deed goes unpunished (wait, is it still a good deed if you’re doing it to get laid?) and the group’s sailboat immediately sinks into the ocean. Thankfully, they’re just a quick swim away from the Grand Island Hotel and the foreboding remnants of a plane crash which doesn’t bother the group one bit. They’ll get a big ol’ exposition dump about the wreck later, but these beach-goers have plenty of other informational fish to fry before then. For starters, how do they got back to the mainland? Is anyone still working at this hotel? It’s July so why is the lobby decorated for… Christmas?
Titled with both bodily fluids and British slang in mind, “Bloody New Year” is a nonsensical low-budget mess that frequently drags. It also boasts practical effects so ambitious that the end result resembles an absurd sizzle reel for cinema’s sloppiest amateur illusionist. The time-travel plot is nothing to write home about, but screenwriter Frazer Pearce delivers enough connective tissue to make this stop-and-start voyage through ghosts, zombies, and awkward dating dynamics into a semi-complete story.
The acting is atrocious, and the editing is so meticulously bizarre its philosophy could only be taught in the Bermuda Triangle. But even for all its baffling camerawork and wild tonal inconsistencies, this water-logged catastrophe shouldn’t be lost. It’s an all-time testament to total artistic commitment — even in the face of obvious issues no one should have ever committed to — and an excuse to revel in the joy of work so ridiculous it starts making more sense after midnight.
“Bloody New Year” is now streaming on Tubi.
The Bite: Those Sure Were Some Ideas You Had There
Check back in a feature-length. Are you watching “Bloody New Year”?
IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations every Friday night at 9:30 p.m. ET. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
