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Bloody New Year




Bloody New Year, 1987

A group of young folks--Lesley (Suzy Aitchison), Tom (Julian Ronnie), Janet (Nikki Brooks), Rick (Mark Powley), and Spud (Colin Heywood)--are at a carnival when two of the guys spot a young woman, Carol (Catherine Roman), being harassed by a man and his two grown sons. Rescuing Carol, the group then flees the creeps in their boat. Unfortunately, they run aground on a strange island where everything seems to be somehow inhabited with a menacing presence.

There's a subgenre of gentle horror, stuff on the more PG side of things, that is the kind of movie that is perfect if you are, I don't know, a slightly timid 10 or 12 year old who is into the idea of horror but not actually emotionally prepared to watch people getting sliced, mutilated, raped, impaled, terrorized, or things of that nature.

Bloody New Year is almost a perfect movie for that kind of niche. And if that sounds like an insult, it really isn't. For the most part, the horror leans on the non-gory side of things, showing imagination without being overly graphic. In one sequence, the group finds an old projector and starts watching the film that's in it on a large screen. Suddenly, inexplicably, one of the people from the film leaps out from the screen and mauls one of the viewers. Later, a woman is suddenly wrapped in a net that slowly tightens around her as an animated rope winds around her leg. It's spooky without being too much.

Now, that said, underneath that family-friendly vibe actually lurks some dark stuff. The thing is: I really liked the characters and didn't want to see anything bad happen to them. They just seem like nice people who enjoy each others' company, have adorable giggly sex, and show a lot of empathy toward others. As the film goes on, the movie is pretty nasty to them. Not in a graphic way, but just in a bleak way. As each character dies or is consumed by the presence on the island, they turn into a sort of evil zombie version of themselves. It's surprisingly upsetting!

The movie benefits from some really nice imagery. Is 95% of it stolen quite blatantly from other movies? Absolutely. But despite stealing the "pushing through a wall like it's fabric" effect from Nightmare on Elm Street or cribbing the stop-motion horror of The Evil Dead, these moments and images are still deployed pretty effectively. One of the seemingly silliest effects---the trees and bushes on the island shaking and laughing--comes with the implication that there are no safe places on this island. There's even a nice callback in the way that the final sequence is shot to how the whole movie began.

This probably isn't gruesome enough for most in this thread, but I was pleasantly surprised by it.