Bloody New Year (Norman J. Warren, 1987)

Bloody New Year is my second exposure to the Norman J. Warren filmography, after Prey aka Alien Prey (the only gender-bending werewolf alien love triangle fish-out-of-water horror film I think I've seen), and I am very much looking forward to seeing the rest. Warren is an absolute madman. These are deeply strange films that take a well-worn setup and twist it into unrecognizable shapes.

Warren himself was unhappy with Bloody New Year, mostly because of budget constraints imposed by the producers, and the characters are thinly drawn compared to Prey, but the film has such a unique rhythm, style, and pace, and so many weird, unexpected things happen, that I wasn't too bothered by its limitations.

The film begins with black-and-white party footage soundtracked by goofy pop earworm "Recipe for Romance" by Cry No More (chorus: "Take one boy/take one girl/add a little love and shake it up, shake it up/that's the recipe for romance"). The producers had so much faith in the song's commercial potential (or owned stock in the label?) that the song appears under the opening AND closing credits and in the background of an early scene. Cry No More briefly appear in the movie, too, but playing a different song. (I also need to mention that one-half of the Cry No More duo is named Chas Cronk.) "Recipe for Romance" could not be more at odds with the film's tone. 

As the song fades, the black-and-white changes to color, and we're at the British seaside with a group of young people. After some gentle ribbing, one of the group, Spud, delivers the immortal line, "If you need me, I'll be at the funfair." Eventually, his pals join him, and they come to the aid of an American woman being harassed by a couple of street punks and their older buddy who operates one of the funfair rides. The trio of jerks get out their brass knuckles and prepare to rumble, but our heroes get the better of them. The American woman joins the group, and they go for a boat ride. 

Guess what? The boat sinks after scraping some rocks, and our intercontinental ragtag band of semi-boring youth wash up on Grand Island (not the small town in Nebraska a few hours from my hometown, but a small British island) and seek shelter in what appears to be the only sign of life, a charming '50s-style resort hotel. The place is abandoned, but the group makes itself at home. Small, eerie things start to happen, and I thought I was in for a ghost story. Then, weirder and weirder things happen, and I didn't know what the hell was going on but I liked it. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, this is a really weird island. I will not spoil anything more, but a scene in the hotel's movie theater is wildly imaginative.

There are so many movies about young people getting picked off one by one and haunted hotels and nice people getting on the wrong side of creeps and abandoned houses with dark secrets. This movie fits into all these categories, but only superficially. Bloody New Year is so much stranger. If the filmmakers and actors had fleshed the characters out a little more and "Recipe for Romance" was played two less times, this would've been a hidden gem, but what's here is still well worth seeing. Norman J. Warren does not make movies like other people make movies, and I mean that as a compliment. 

The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932)

The Most Dangerous Game packs a lot into just over an hour: shipwrecks, shark attacks, decadent mansion lounging, the hunting of humans for sport, dog attacks, crossbow attacks, knife attacks, possible romance, drunken buffoonery, murder, fights that turn into epic wrestling matches, daring boat escapes, an alligator, and piano playing.

The efficient, confident, and exciting Game was surprisingly co-directed by two people, the team of Irving Pichel, a character actor who had never directed before (he went on to direct several mainstream Hollywood films in parallel to his acting career), and Ernest B. Schoedsack, a pioneering cinematographer, cameraman, and documentary filmmaker who had also recently directed a couple of adventure movies, one of them with the man who would become his usual filmmaking partner, Merian C. Cooper. Schoedsack and Cooper would co-direct King Kong the following year. (Cooper and Schoedsack are the Powell and Pressburger of giant ape and high adventure movies.)

Both filmmakers' backgrounds leave an imprint here, with a shared emphasis on performance and image. The actors have a lot to do and Schoedsack gets the opportunity to show off some breathtaking camera movements and difficult trick shots. It's a good-looking movie with lots of atmosphere and menace.

You're probably familiar with the story and its many adaptations (including Ernest R. Dickerson's '90s version, Surviving the Game, with Ice T in the Joel McCrea role against a whole team of hunters including Rutger Hauer, Gary Busey, Charles S. Dutton, and F. Murray Abraham). Sticking closely to the source, a Richard Connell short story published in Collier's, The Most Dangerous Game opens with Bob (Joel McCrea), a famous big-game hunter, surviving a yacht wreck and ensuing shark attack. He ends up at the swank island digs of a fellow big-game hunter, Zaroff (Leslie Banks), where he meets Zaroff's creepy servants and two fellow shipwreck survivors, Eve (Fay Wray) and her drunken, buffoonish brother Martin (Robert Armstrong). Zaroff is a bit of a mysterious weirdo (and his trophy room is locked), but he's a gracious host until he reveals his plan of hunting Bob for sport. What a buzzkill.

The rest of the film concerns Bob and Eve's plan to survive the night, with Zaroff in hot pursuit, and it's a still-thrilling blend of action and horror that's as fun for me on this third viewing as it was the first time I saw it in a film history class in college 20+ years ago. It's a great example of the economical, action-packed, '30s high-class B-movie. I wish Hollywood still made tight, efficient 63-minute genre films instead of the green-screen pummel and bloat spectacles of today, but I'm clearly outnumbered. I may even like this one more than King Kong (or maybe it's just that the racism is more muted here, though I wish Fay Wray had more to do than scream and follow McCrea once the chase begins, especially since she's such a sharp character inside the house).