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.