Alright. Since I’ve celebrated trash cinema by having reviewed one of the worst and one of the best movies that I’ve seen on BAD MOVIE MONDAY, how about this time I just do a review about an average middle-of-the-road movie? One that didn’t surprise me and didn’t hugely stand out, but was still a lot of fun.
When COVID shut down everything two years ago, I started an online bad movie night get-together with some friends that we eventually dubbed “Bad Movie Monday”. The premise was simple: We’d torture each other every Monday with the worst trash we could find, tell a few jokes, cheer each other up, and in the process maybe discover some weird obscure cinema that we might never have seen any other way. This series of reviews will feature highlights of those night, so you guys can share in the fun and maybe get some ideas for your own movie night.
The way BMM works is that I make a post in a group I created on social media. I write up a little intro, copy out the synopsis from the back of the VHS or DVD and then make ten predictions (or ten promises if I’ve already seen the film) about what kind of awful hideous trash is going to be unleashed into people’s eyes and brains. So here, for you today, is a very mildly edited version of what I usually write.
This one was for the film BLOODY NEW YEAR which we watched on January 3, 2022. Enjoy!
It’s a new year and as luck would have it the very first pick of BAD MOVIE MONDAY is mine. So I not only chose one of the most terrible films I could find, just so nobody would think I’d lost my edge, but I also chose one that was thematic. Bloody New Year is a 1987 British horror film from director Norman J. Warren. It is an utterly baffling mess. Everyone who worked seemed to have been fairly experienced, Warren had been directing films for 25 years at the time, yet the whole thing looks like it was made by a first timer who barely knew which way to point the camera. What’s especially tragic is that you can sort of see the good film that’s hiding under the bad one. The actors all look like they have skills. The locations are pretty cool. There seems to have been some semblance of a budget. It’s just that there is no direction and no script, and the music is just awful. It’s all upbeat stuff that does not work with any of the “horror” this tries to evoke.
So, what’s the back of the VHS box say?
“SHOULD OLD AQUAINTANCES BE FORGOT? OR JUST BRUTALLY MURDERED.
No need to make reservations for this New Year’s Eve party. There’s plenty of room!
The hotel is all done up for New Year’s. The tree’s been trimmed since before Christmas, the party clothes are neatly laid out for the guests. There are only two catches: it’s the middle of July and these guests have been dead for 30 years.
And when five unsuspecting people stumble into this bizarre inn they find themselves steeped in a tortured world of past horrors and present dangers. An agonized, inexplicable evil is determined to avenge a murder three decades old. And this poltergeist doesn’t care who pays.
There’s only one house rule at this hotel. Guests had better be gone before check-out time!”
Wow. This synopsis is inaccurate horseshit. The movie is not about a thirty year old murder being avenged, and there are SIX main characters who end up on the haunted island not five. We’re not off to a good start here.
PROMISES!
#1 – Director Norman J. Warren said he gave up on this film on the second day of dubbing and you’ll be able to tell almost exactly when he stopped giving a shit.
#2 – “Who are these people?”, “What are they doing?” and “Why is any of this happening?” are going to be frequent questions.
#3 – The first fifteen minutes of the film are basically the cast and crew hanging out at a fair and shooting as much filler as they can there without permits.
#4 – Seriously, this movie looks like it was edited by a chimpanzee with ADHD and cataracts.
#5 – There is a surprising car chase, complete with stunts, and it’s kind of tense to watch because you can tell almost nobody involved is a stuntman.
#6 – Sadly, no gratuitties. Which is odd since director Norman J. Warren started out making stag movies.
#7 – The British accents sound too damn fancy for this crap.
#8 – It is obvious the movie had no script and that the “story” was built around the location and props as they were shooting.
#9 – A few of the special effects are kind of clever. The effects guy was probably the only enthusiastic person on set.
#10 – You know your movie in incoherent when even the exposition dump at the end is a confusing mess.
So, how was this film received by the other people in the BAD MOVIE MONDAY group who were not as um, fortunate, as I was and hadn’t seen it before? I think they dug it. I think that, by now, they’ve started to understand the specific kind of bad movies I prefer. It was a fun night. Watch enough bad movies and you start to really appreciate the people who make these. Yes, we spent all night busting their balls a bit, but we’d never make fun of them on a personal level. They did the best that they could with what they had. All while dealing with the hell of not having enough time or budget to really do what they’d have wanted. No, the jokes we make are closer to gallows humor rather than snide remarks. Never make fun of a person’s dream, but you can commiserate with their failure to achieve that dream by goofing a bit. Humor’s good for morale. Besides, I personally loved this movie as much as the people who made it loved the idea of making it. So, in a weird way, it wasn’t really a failure. Not to me anyway.