BLOODY NEW YEAR (1987)

Well, I spoke too soon folks. After the last review, I mentioned only knowing about one New Year’s eve themed horror (New Year’s Evil), but then decided to dig deeper while it’s still the holiday weekend. Surprisingly enough I came across another one, from the 80s no less, in the form of BLOODY NEW YEAR. Right off, we can tell this is a low-budget (almost zero budget) escapade, but let’s see if that has any bearing on the entertainment value. The movie starts off on a bad editing note. Bad editing in that it was tough to follow what was going on and the scenes were way too jarring. Basically, friends are spending time at a carnival and notice some...punks? thugs? macho-men? bothering a young lady so they fight them off and proceed to take a boat nearby to escape their new enemies…only to wash ashore a seemingly deserted house. Super shaky camera angles didn’t help the opening few minutes, but we get past it eventually. Anywho, back to the deserted house and if we know anything in the genre, a deserted house is never deserted for long. What follows are random figures/ghosts showing up to fight the group, the house’s appliances taking a life of their own, and ghostly apparitions. The issue I had is there didn’t seem to be a narrative; just random scenes happening with no structure. The ‘movie rules’ didn’t make sense either. So...a ghost shows up, turns one of the folks into a half zombie creature, then she defeats the ghost who turned her? Or an elevator can swallow a person, but the stairs won’t turn into a trap door? We don’t need 100% logic; but many things didn’t make sense. We get a low budget mash up of Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, and other ghost flicks that don’t quite add up. I’ll say this; I did love the explanation of who/what the villains were when we finally learned about them. It was the bland execution that knocks the score down. Couple decent ideas in here, but you’ll prob watch it once and forget about it. Check it out to add another obscure title to the list…but there are better flicks to ring in the new year.

SLASH SCENE: The laughing appearing footsteps in the sand

SLASH SCORE: 3/5