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Horror fans who delight in the cheesy and the silly may find a fair bit to appreciate with Norman J. Warrens' "Bloody New Year". Don't go into it expecting anything resembling a coherent plot, but be prepared for a lot of insane nonsense.

The story has three young couples up to a whole bunch of tomfoolery at a carnival who afterwards find themselves shipwrecked on an island. This island features a hotel that not only is celebrating Christmas in July, it's celebrating Christmas circa 1959, and is eagerly anticipating 1960.

Among the assorted crackpot ideas Warren and screenwriter Frazer Pearce throw at the wall are snow indoors, invisible pursuers, a furiously moving camera seemingly inspired by "The Force" from "The Evil Dead", a "table monster", and lots of hilariously, endearingly tacky special effects. The good thing is that Warren and Pearce do seem to be just having fun with the genre because this whole production has a heavy tongue in cheek feel. Now, some people may find this simply *too* cheesy and *too* silly, but others should find themselves smiling if not laughing outright.

The first 15 minutes quickly establish the irreverent tone, and the filmmakers do achieve and maintain a certain loopy charm and a "Just what the hell is going on?" sensibility. The actors do an impressive job of keeping poker faces throughout, and they're all reasonably appealing, although there will undoubtedly be viewers who will get sick of all the screaming that Janet (Nikki Brooks) does. One of the best routines involves some appearing and disappearing sets of footprints.

These 90 minutes of off-the-wall antics don't quite fly by, but enough amusing stuff happens to help people pay attention. The music, by Nick Magnus and a duo dubbed "Cry No More", merely adds to the appeal. All things considered, this is an interesting effort among Warrens' filmography.

Six out of 10.

"Bloody New Year" is a very cheesy horror film set on an isolated island.The acting is wonderfully bad and the gore scenes as well as various exploitation elements known from earlier Norman J.Warren's releases("Satan's Slave","Alien Prey")are almost completely absent.The film has some really surprising moments-the scene where Rick and his girlfriend are chased by a crowd of people through the rustling woods except their pursuers are invisible is the highlight of the film.6 out of 10!

Teenagers?? The actors look like they are well into their 20's, if not older! A group of "teens" find themselves in a spot of bother at the seaside when their boat starts to sink and they swim to the nearest island. Here there is a seemingly deserted hotel, stuck in a time warp of New Year's Eve 1959. Ghastly things start to happen to them, one by one. Plot wise I felt able to follow it, despite being a load of nonsense. On the negative side the acting was very wooden, as mentioned before the actors look much older than teenagers, the special effects are cheap looking and it has an obvious low budget feel and look to it. On the positives some of it was filmed at Barry Island seaside resort, a place that I have visited several times and it was nice to see how it used to look. Among the effects are a few clever tricks, such as an arm coming out of a mirror and pulling a victim inside. The British VHS comes in a terrific, 3D box. The picture quality isn't great, not sure if it has ever been released on DVD/BR but deserves to be. Not Warren's best film and not the best film to watch on NYE either but reasonably entertaining if you like bad movies.

If "Terror" was Norman J Warren's take on "Suspiria", then "Bloody New Year" is surely his version of "The Beyond". After a slow start, it changes from a British teens at the seaside affair, all big dippers and frustrated love triangles, to a delirious zombie movie - "Quadrophenia" crossed with Lucio Fulci.

Considering the extremely low-budget, this is a creditable piece of filmmaking, with Warren achieving some neat shock effects. The young and unknown cast acquit themselves reasonably and there is some groovy organ music to spice up the final reel mayhem. The unexpected arrival of the fairground yobs adds to the fun.

I do have two questions though! Norman is such a nice man so why does he go in for ultra-downbeat endings? And is there really a time-warp island,complete with drooling zombies, living lifts and ambulatory fishing nets,within sailing distance of Barry Island Funfair? Has the local Tourist Information Centre been informed? (Wait a minute, that's three questions).

Bloody New Year (1987) is a British horror film 🇬🇧 that I recently watched on Tubi. The story follows a group of teenagers who stumble upon a remote island and discover a hotel still decorated for a New Year's Eve party-despite it being the middle of summer.

Directed by Norman Warren (Pray, Gunpowder), the film stars Suzy Aitchison (Clatterford), Nikki Brooks (Jupiter Moon), Steve Wilsher (The Mad), and Mark Powley (Bronson).

The film had a distinct vibe that reminded me of the Necronomicon. While the makeup effects for the possessed were only average, I enjoyed the way they were presented-it made for an entertaining watch. While Bloody New Year isn't a perfect film or a genre classic, it has enough charm to warrant a viewing.

I'd give it a 5/10.

Anyone expecting Bloody New Year to be a cheesy slice of seasonal slasher fun will no doubt be sorely disappointed: despite having a title that conjures up images of a bloody Father Time slicing New Years revellers in half with his massive scythe, the film is, in fact, a supernatural horror that shamelessly rips off Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead whilst throwing in as much random nonsense that it possibly can.

After running into a spot of bother with some nasty fair-ground thugs, a group of teens set off in their sail boat, only to encounter more trouble when a collision with a rock forces them to abandon ship and swim to a nearby island. There, they discover a strange, seemingly abandoned hotel adorned with New Year decorations (despite it being mid-July), and encounter the restless spirits of the hotel's inhabitants, who have been trapped in limbo since 1959 thanks to a government experiment gone wrong.

This logic-free plot allows for a scatter-shot approach by director Norman J. Warren, who gives viewers everything from traditional transparent spooks to a possessed bird-shaped Newell post (!) in the process. Other bizarre occurrences include a murderous sheik emerging from an old black and white film, a killer fishing net, a monster that emerges from a table-top, walls that come alive, an indoor blizzard, and a collection of Evil Dead style zombies. As well as borrowing the look and sound of Raimi's 'deadites', Warren also adopts his directorial techniques, with the camera rushing around the hotel and through undergrowth towards the terrified victims.

The cast are, as expected, rather dreadful (although Nikki Brooks as Janet is cute), the gore is extremely cheap looking, and the special effects range from the inventive to the downright pathetic, but Bloody New year is such a ridiculous and completely surreal experience from start to finish that It actually proves to be pretty enjoyable; after all, any film with malevolent kitchen utensils can't be completely worthless.

This final feature by UK schlockmeister Warren--apparently so unhappy an experience he didn't want to make any more--has an enjoyably daft, anything-goes approach to horror that would be more fun if the film were better made. Six youths visit a fun fair, then run afoul of some nasty carnies. (The highpoint of this is when they manage to shake off from a speeding vehicle the three carnies, each of whom magically falls onto a separate, conveniently located pile of empty cardboard boxes.) Then the youths are suddenly on a boat, which runs aground near an island occupied by an abandoned resort hotel that has apparently been frozen in time since 1960.

Of course, our protagonists are soon prey to terrors and death, but even basic binding fantasy logic is missing. There are ghosts, zombies, monsters, inanimate objects (appliances, a wooden carving, a snooker table, an elevator wall) that "come to life"...even those malevolent carnies return, though god only knows how they got here. It's a little like a low-budget "Shining"--except as arbitrary in its perils as something like "Hausu"--except with little filmmaking style or basic competence to make the nuttiness seem more inspired than just silly.

We've all seen worse, and the sheer randomness of the ideas provides a certain amount of entertainment value. Still, this falls short as both "so bad it's good" and the kind of movie that can actually pull off its deliberate senselessness with panache. It's a medium-hot mess that isn't exactly dull, and has the virtue of not being a formulaic slasher, but is just too sloppily put together to provide more than a few disbelieving yoks.

One of those films that's so average it's actually a good watch.

An eighties made film that's got a fifties time travel element to it, seemingly filmed in the same location as 1987's Who serial "Delta and the Bannermen" starring Sylvester McCoy.

Fittingly this has a late 80's Dr Who feel to it, bad dialogue and a cheesy synth score. But it also terribly entertaining, this has a lot too do with the cast, not the script.

There's enough decent set pieces to keep the horror fan interested. Finally a decent effort for a British attempt at horror from this era.

I knew very little about Bloody New Year prior to watching it for this review. I thought it might be another slasher movie themed around yet another public holiday just like New Year's Evil.

How wrong I was! Every now and again I watch a film that is so 'out there' that I think to myself 'What the hell was that?!' Bloody New Year is one such film.

We see New Year celebrations at a small coastal hotel with the guests forming a conga and leaving the function room with only one woman remaining. The action then shoots forward to the 80's whereby some young adults are at a funfair and see an American girl being harassed on the waltzers by some locals/carnies. They decide to rescue her but piss off the carnies in the process who chase after them. They all get into a boat and sail away to a small local island to escape them. They run aground and have to swim/wade to shore. Once there they see a small hotel in the distance and decide to go there to dry off and freshen up. Things turn increasingly weird when they get there.

This film is actually British made and feels like one of the Look and Read dramas that were made for schools in the UK in the 80's. In fact I seem to remember seeing one which was called Fairground! (loving the exclamation mark!) in 1983. Its almost like this film was written for (and possibly by) a bunch of 8 years olds. That's not to put the film down but just to point out that the whole film holds a remarkably non-jaded and innocent air to events that unfurl within the movie.

Bloody New Year is cheaply made, the special effects are sub-par, the events that happen within the hotel feel like a string of cliches. In fact, the film feels like a bunch of kids were given some video nasties to watch and then the film's writers asked them what they had seen and noted their exaggerated recollections down and used them as the plot of this movie.

Whilst all of these points feel like criticisms, amazingly THEY'RE NOT! I watched it, was left with the feeling of 'What the...?!' when it finished but also realised that I had loved it! And that is one of the things about cult cinema- the film you hold dear might be completely inept and a poorly executed movie resplendent with shoddy production values. But it might have an air or an atmosphere to it that is specific to that film and that film alone. And Bloody New Year has this in spades.

I love the fact that it is British made, with the male characters looking like contestants from a 1987 episode of Blind Date. They're all mullets and C&A/Burton's clothing. The fashions exhibited by the female characters is no better. It's such a shame when they decide to change out of their clothes into the 1950's togs they find at the hotel.

The chain of events that happen in the seemingly possessed hotel feel like a million miles away from The Shining. In fact, instead of merely regurgitating the events from Kubrick's film albeit with a fraction of the budget (although there are unavoidable similarities regarding past events being held in both locales), the film seemingly goes down the route of using The Evil Dead as a primary influence. This is interesting as the filmmakers must have seen the film, admired it's low budget ethos (they knew that this was the route to go down for their film with it's apparent lack of a sizeable budget) and how it worked admirably for Sam Raimi (and also how the film was absolutely huge and not just in the UK because of the video nasty furore and the film being banned but also worldwide) . Thus within Bloody New Year we get bodily dismemberment, characters turning into zombies/demons and even a male character who returns to the hotel only to then turn into a zombie/demon. There even a scene that takes place in the woods near the hotel in which they seemingly come to life and sounds of people's laughter (in reality possibly a sitcom laugh track obtained by the filmmakers) being heard by the characters trying to escape this particular madness. There is even a POV shot with the camera rushing at the characters through the woods like Raimi used to great effect in his film.

Then there is the make-up used for the effects in the film that looks like it was done by a GCSE art group. A trick within low budget filmmaking is not to focus on the make up or effects for too long especially if they were done on the cheap. This film bravely chooses to go the opposite route and focus on them in lingering shots. Potentially not a wise move but another quality of the film that makes it so endearing.

I'm loving the fact that one of the deaths was seemingly inspired by The Exorcist with a character's neck (one of the carnies from the beginning of the film who hated the group so much that they actually went to the trouble of finding another boat and sailing to the island after the youngsters to wreak revenge) being twisted around not just once but multiple times for added horror effect.

Also within this mess is the fact that within the hotel seemingly inanimate objects have the power to come alive and attack the group (a fishing net and carved head on a bannister being but two), the character of a ghost chambermaid who reappears and then disappears numerous times during the film's running time and a sequence involving all of the monsters/demons/zombies coming together to ask the two human characters to just give in and 'join us' (again, The Evil Dead influence resounds loudly!).

Look out for the scene near the end where the house seemingly gets bored of the couple of characters who are still human and just chucks them out of one of it's windows. Hilarious.

Blend all of these ingredients together and you have a cheap horror movie made for the straight to video market in the UK where the whole 'video nasty' moral panic was going through a second wave (possibly because Sam Raimi had just released The Evil Dead 2, ironically). Bloody New Year should have been bogged down by it's seemingly negative aspects and forgotten about.

But that's the thing. Even though it should be rubbish, it's not! One major plus is that it's never boring. My interest never flagged during the runtime and I was gripped until the end. The film has so much wide-eyed innocence to it and that fact that it feels like an especially bloody 'made for schools' special or episode of Dramarama that it works. It also has heart. This is cult cinema at it's purest and before you ask I would never call this 'so bad, it's good' (I would never call any film that redundant term). It has qualities that any number of big budget horror films will never have. I'd see this again in a heartbeat. I think this is infinitely better than It and the recent Halloween reimagining put together.

And the strange thing is that others agree with me. I thought I was going mad at how much I enjoyed this film and so I did something that I rarely do- I search online for other reviews. Sure there were the idiots who said that this was trash. But there were others who loved the film also despite it's flaws or limitations. I'm not mad after all! There's even a Cinema Snob episode devoted to it.

I look forward to buying the Blu Ray release of this from the States on Vinegar Syndrome.

Bloody New Year has a few good ideas. The locations are appropriately moody and atmospheric and there are a few neat moments of Nightmare on Elm Street-esque "rubber reality", but that's about all there is to recommend.

There's not much of a story to speak of, the dialogue gets the job done, and the acting is mostly serviceable, but you never really feel like there's any urgency to anything. At times, there's a nice funhouse quality to the film where you never know what you'll see when a character (or characters) enter a room, but it wears thin quickly once you realize that's all this film will be doing for 90 minutes.

Just take a nap instead.

A group of teenagers hang out at an amusement park, hang out on a small boat, hang out at an old abandoned hotel on an island and (yawn) are killed when it's discovered that the island is caught in a time warp. It's never explained who is killing them or why they are killed to keep them there, but that's just one of the many problems that this movie has. An interesting premise gets flushed right down the toilet in this horribly boring movie, only saved by some hit and miss special effects: effects that are sometimes clever and sometimes pathetic. The highlight of this movie though is when a guy jumps out of an old movie and attacks the guy watching him, but this is too weird and badly acted to keep your attention for very long, and the actors accents are sometimes almost unintelligible. This also has one of the worst soundtracks you'll ever hear.

If my personal resolution for 2008 would to avoid watching worthless, crummy and totally retarded horror movies, I already would have sinned with "Bloody New Year". This is quite an incoherent and severely unsatisfying hodgepodge of potentially interesting story ideas, truly poor scripting work, horrible acting performances and a painful shortage of gore. I expected a holiday-themed slasher storyline (in the likes of "Happy Birthday to Me" or "Silent Night, Deadly Night"), but instead this film is a bizarre type of ghost story/demonic possession tale. Six hugely irritating teenagers intend to spend their summer vacation quarreling with carnival carnies and taking boat trips too far off the safe English coasts. Their boat hits a rock and the sextet washes ashore an island where everything is decorated to celebrate New Year's Eve of 1959. From this point on, a whole series of ridiculous and laughable UN-horrific events takes place, including the ghostly appearances of housemaids, murderous fishing nets coming to life, distant buzzing and laughter can be heard all over the island and the teenagers gradually turn into a bloodthirsty demons with rotting faces. There's no waterproof explanation for the events, but the script repeatedly hints that the crashing of government plane, carrying a top-secret experiment, on the 31st of December 1959 caused the island to be stuck in a time warp. Still that doesn't explain how pool tables come to life or why soup kettles develop murderous tendencies, but who cares? The island setting is atmospheric and the time warp concept is admirable (particularly with the New Year's celebration), but the overall execution is very weak. None of the characters are sympathetic, so you really don't care whether they all live or die, and there's zero tension throughout the entire film. "Bloody New Year" is overlong even with a running time of barely 90 minutes and the total absence of graphic gore & nudity are unforgivable. Damned, this is an 80's movie starring 6 dimwitted teenagers AND it's directed by UK's shlockmeister Norman J. Warren! The least I expected from the creator of such rancid nonsense as "Prey", "Inseminoid" and "Satan's Slave" was a bit more mindless violence and/or sleaze. One to avoid.

"Bloody New Year" follows a group of young adults who wind up stranded on an island through unusual circumstances. They seek shelter in an abandoned hotel there, which after all doesn't seem quite abandoned; decorations from a New Year's Party abound, as does a Christmas tree-but it's summertime. Soon enough, they find themselves the target of horrors beyond belief.

This offbeat British slasher flick is actually more of a haunted house movie than it might appear; the film starts in a beachside amusement park, and the horrors the characters experience in the hotel after mirror the terrors of the carnival funhouse. The fun of the film is that danger lurks around every corner, and something utterly fantastical, lethal--or a combination of both--is lying in wait.

Where "Bloody New Year" falters is in its pacing and the way in which it deals out information. The middle section of the film is weighted down by a series of bizarre incidents and murders that defy logic, and these episodic scenes come one after the other without a shred of insight or explanation. By the time the film winds down to its conclusion and an explanation is offered, it's almost difficult to care. Despite this, there are some fun set pieces, hokey special effects, and a handful of well-crafted sequences that mirror elements of "The Shining."

Overall, "Bloody New Year" is really not the sum of its parts, but it's an amusing oddity by and large, whose main problem is that it alienates its audience for the majority of the runtime. The final reveal is ludicrous, but ludicrous in a way that seems to fit with the rest of the picture's modus operandi. A goofy, unconventional offering, but don't expect a straightforward slasher, because what you get is more "Scooby Doo" than "hack-and-slash." 6/10.

The thing I love most about horror films is watching something that might not have the best budget, or be the most glossily produced, but where you can see that there's someone, somewhere involved in the production who deeply cares about what they're doing and is trying to make the film great. Bloody New Year is one of the best examples of this I've seen. It has this heart and care in abundance.

In particular, the reason I rate this film so highly, is through the lens of someone who loves low budget horror films made by someone who cares, and in that capacity, this is one of the best examples around.

In comparison to other horror films, the actors know how to do their job, and fill their roles brilliantly, and actor Mark Powley risks his neck doing one stunt without safety equipment. Obviously actors shouldn't have to do that, but it feels like it represents the effort these actors put into their roles in this film. It stands head and shoulders above some other horror films, even better known ones, that often have examples of acting that is sometimes laughable, like the infamous scene with Rachel Howard in Friday the 13th part III. You don't get that here. You have scenes with people like Suzy Aitchison, who's expression at one crucial point was used in much of the film's promotion, because she just sells what's going on with just a look. It's a great example of horror makeup and acting working together, and I can't think of many examples which match it.

In terms of the effects and makeup as well, there is real care taken over them. The film does not have the greatest budget, of course, and you can sense the frustration at certain points, as if they would have loved to have made certain shots just a little bit better. There is a scene, for example, where one of the supernatural foes reaches out of a wall. Initially it looks like a regular wall, and afterwards, they cut to an actual wall (I should say 'back of a lift') and all of that is perfect. Once the figure reaches out of the wall, it becomes apparent that it's stretched plastic with paint, as the paint peels off as soon as the material stretches, and it's something that could be pulled off much more easily today, but you can just see how hard they have tried to make that one fairly quick shot work, and it honestly does. So many things with the film hinge on strange happenings, and then things going back to normal, that you can sort of 'roll with' the idea that the assailant is just causing all the paint to fall off, only to have the wall healed moments later. This sort of heart shows through in many of the effects and deaths in the film, and there are so many of them as well. That scene with the wall was over in moments. It wasn't overused. And despite having so little screen time, people visibly put so much effort into making it look right. That is the reason I love this film, in microcosm.

One of the key people who cared so much about this film was the director, Norman J Warren, and that really is key to the whole thing. You can see the love he had for this film, even though he was so upset with how production had gone. I would so dearly love to see the sort of film he could make with proper support and funding, but apparently the way the film was treated by the producers saddened him so much he was dissuaded from making any more films. He has said he felt like he had given up by the second day of the dub, but the passion he clearly had is still visible in the film. In particular, he mentioned the music and sound design, and I really feel like that's an area where so many horror films are lacking. There are so many scenes and effects and set-pieces that aren't 'milked', but just used to contribute to this feeling of horror and disorientation and then that's it. There is a scene with objects coming to life in the kitchen, and so much care is put into shots that are on screen for as little as a second, and that just carries through the whole film.

The film has been negatively compared to old episodes of Dr Who, but I want to make that comparison a positive. At certain points it does almost feel like Ace and Sylvester McCoy's Doctor could wander in, and it has a very similar vibe. It helps that every aspect of it is soaked in a very British feeling from that time, down to the nettles and flowering gorse the actors pass by in the wonderful Welsh shooting location of Barry Island. It is so clearly a product of that time, and the almost visible struggle of trying to make effects work on an all too limited budget just adds to the 'whovian' feel. The main difference being, this feels like there is far more care taken than similar contemporary Dr Who episodes. It feels very similar to 'Curse of Fenric', which came out a couple of years after this film, but again, it seems like so much more care and effort was put into Bloody New Year.

It's also been accused of ripping off parts of multiple other films (Evil Dead, The Beyond, Shock Waves, Dawn of the Dead) which I absolutely do not buy. You'll almost never find a film that doesn't have elements that are similar to other films, particularly in a genre film, and the parts that are supposedly derivative don't feel in the least bit related to the previous works, to my eyes. I do not think for a moment that Lesley seems like Cheryl from Evil Dead, and I honestly struggle to see the comparison. If it's nothing more than 'a character gets possessed', then you may as well say Evil Dead rips off The Exorcist. What this film does is incorporate multiple ideas in a plot that doesn't feel at all reminiscent of other films before it (again, it's older than the Dr Who episodes to which it feels more related.)

In short, this film has all of the charm of a restricted budget horror film where you can 'see the strings', but even that is too harsh a criticism, give that there are scenes with levitating knives, for example, where you very specifically *can't* see any strings, or even the slightest glint of fishing line, despite the shot only being visible for a second. I really wish we had the chance to see more films from this director, as I feel like he could have made some wonderful horror over the years if this production had not upset him so much.

Saw this on Netflix. I know characters in horror movies need to be dumb for the movies to work, but this movie might contain the most mentally challenged characters I've ever seen in a movie. The plot is unoriginal and the acting and effects in this are far worse than most 'b' movies. Don't waste your time watching this.

A gang of young folks end up in a deserted hotel on some random island and are terrorized by the spirits who lurk there. It's a little bit like The Shining, but without all that pesky dread. Zombies leap out of walls, film screens, and the group starts turning into zombies themselves, but nothing every really makes a lick of sense and you keep expecting someone to wake up, revealing it was all a bad dream. Speaking of the sleep, the pacing will really give your eyelids a workout.

Still, some of the imagery is interesting and I feel like this one might be a movie that plays better in clips than as a full feature.