Ring in the ‘Bloody New Year’: This Supernatural ’80s Throwback Makes More Sense After Midnight
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.
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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
As cheap as bottom-shelf champagne, “Bloody New Year” feels like the kind of discount hangover you’d pick up at Party City. (R.I.P. to humanity’s most festive retailer, by the way.) There’s enough cinematic chaos here to fuel film flashbacks for a lifetime — and regardless of how you fared with its slower moments, this movie offers such a diverse treasure trove of midnight wonders that it’s a surprisingly universal fit for fans of schlock.
It’s one thing to identify obvious continuity errors or revel in the “Well, that didn’t work!” of SFX gone sideways. But there’s a whole world of wackiness to enjoy when you also buy into the human drama this off-kilter affair only vaguely tries to sell you. I’m as curious to know why they chose to have a studio audience laugh track emanating from a haunted bush(???) as I am to pick apart the baffling love triangle between these ludicrously dumb characters.
Sure, that ghostly cabaret singer wants us to have questions about the cloaking device that trapped her, the pilot, that maid, these boneheads, and a few dozen others thanks to the government’s recklessness. But more important to me is why everyone seems so weirdly obsessed with Rick. And if Lesley died getting punched in the stomach, how did her zombie face end of up looking like… that?
Explain the purpose of the snow globe scene. And tell me, was that killer fish net sentient? How about the vulture-shaped stair post? Or the demon vacuum that did pretty much nothing except fall over? Breaking down the technical ins-and-outs of these randomly enchanted objects alongside whatever thorny psychology gave Tom such a huge chip on his shoulder offers hours of fun to the right viewers — if only because it allows you to repeatedly assess the logic behind this filmmaker saying, “Good enough!”
Interrogating bad art at length is a kindness, and “Bloody New Year” plays like a throwback selection that is grateful for whatever visitors it can muster. Oceans of work went into making the Grande Island Hotel as good as it is (the elevator is so good and then so bad!), and the push and pull of something that seems at once meticulously thought-out and entirely half-assed makes for a wonderfully strange watch. You feel something watching this, and that can’t be said of everything in 2025.
Director Warren reportedly had issues with his producer and stopped making features after this — but he did return to oversee the 2K restoration in 2019. While the Blu-ray bonus features are a great excuse to invest in physical media this year, Tubi offering such a bizarre artifact to audiences free of charge is its own victory. All movies, even those far removed from science fiction, exist in a self-contained time loop eventually. “Bloody New Year” is a straight-to-video phantom just waiting to be awoken and it does eternity in style. OK, a style.
IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations every Friday night at 9:30 p.m. ET. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
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