Movie Review: Bloody New Year

A group of friends, killing an afternoon at a local carnival, taunt a trio of carnies. After fighting and fleeing from said carnies, the group hightails it from the carnival (now with an extra girl in tow), and heads to the beach for an afternoon sailing adventure.

After crashing into a rock, the sextet wades ashore to a nearby island. Fearing that they are shipwrecked on a deserted island, the group is ecstatic to find a resort hotel, pristine and picturesque, and still decorated for New Year's Eve. Exploring their newfound refuge, weirdness begins as random voices and sounds echo throughout the empty hotel. Boogeymen begin to spring up in unsuspecting places.

Leaving no holiday unscathed, the horror genre has a movie for just about any holiday you can dream up. For me, New Year's is mostly a forgotten holiday that means an extra day off and beer. With low expectations, I opted for this low scale holiday farce, figuring it should be a suitable distraction considering the lazy holiday New Year's tends to be.

Since my expectations were low to begin with, I managed to escape this confused beast of a flick with little to no disappointment. Expecting the worst, I got it. Standing out as a glaring example of plot cohesion and fluidity gone bad, Bloody New Year is a hard one to follow. There is little that makes sense throughout this film, aside from "they're gonna die!" convictions as we bounce along disjointedly from one deadly scenario to another.

As the plot finally takes hold and starts to chug along, it appears at first that we're going to be in for a ghost story. With haunting giggles, laughter and spectral party music popping up at random times, it seemed fitting that the empty hotel on a deserted island could in fact be haunted. So far, so good.

As we move along to the first jump scene of our film, we see a sheik on an ancient film reel leap from the screen to wreak havoc and mayhem. Again, haunted hotel, semi-cool ghost effect. Alrighty, now we're starting to churn. Now we jump to our first separated couple, exploring a fishing shack near the beach. Attacked by a moving fishing net? Well, now you're stretching it a bit.

Article Author: Casey Criswell

Falling in love with bad horror films at a very young age, Casey Criswell strives to bring back the classics in today's modern age of horror remakes. Armed with nothing but a DVD player and keyboard, he charges into battle with his mighty battle cry …

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