Are you craving for some cheese of the highest order, perhaps a potent dose of 80's camp, or maybe you just want to turn off logical thinking entirely? If so, look no further, because "Bloody New Year" has it all, and has more fun with it than some other similars. It's silly, faulty, and undeniably a complete mess, but cool ideas are thrown around, and the 90 minutes are ridiculous enough to keep You going.

In this forgotten little adventure, a typical group of enduringly one-dimensional friends are out to entertain themselves in an amusement park, where they save a girl who's being harassed, then, together, they escape said harassers, and are now on a boat going to... somewhere. String of bad luck starts with the boat sinking, and them wounding up on an abandoned island with a hotel in the middle of it, where everything is decorated as if it was the New Year of 1960, despite it being the middle of summer sometime in the 80's...

Even though the story is a complete mess with big holes and odd structures, delayed and irrational reactions from the characters etc., it does feel like director Norman J. Warren has tried to make it as intriguing as possible, even though the twists are apparent quicker than quickly. Nonetheless, Norman has fun every step of the way, and the atmosphere, likely meant to be creepy and mysterious, is consistently amusing, funny. Cheese and camp, ain't no better words. A quote by Janet sums the movie up well: "We crashed up a perfectly innocent ghost train and now we're stuck in a time warp!

There are plenty of goofs and filmmaking mistakes, like during the amusement park sequence, when the tilt-a-whirl stops, the men are supposed to be thrown off, but they very visibly run and throw themselves off. Later, poor Tom, the nicest man in the movie, is looking for the fuse box. He goes down in a well-lit basement, and as he's lighting a candle that makes no visible difference, he says: "Sods law, the fuse box is always in the darkest corner". The fuse box was in the frame behind him. Tom's so nice, he couldn't even answer to the horny calls of girls. Twice. As opposed to most movies, the horny teenager force in "Bloody New Year" are women, not men. Don't get excited though, there are not enough gore and boobs to compliment the film on that. All the elements around the characters, including dialogue and acting, is inconsistent and often silly, sometimes they act heartfelt, sometimes as if they weren't friends, but mostly the characters behave low-key stupid.

I found one scene particularly hilarious, Janet and macho man Rick are running in the forest. It's daylight. Various bushes around start shaking, emitting a sound,basically a laugh track, much like one everyone knows from the series "Friends". As if that's not enough of misfired horror, camera starts fast runs towards the now hugged together characters from various angles, simultaneously intensifying the laugh track. They eventually start running, stop and see footprints appearing in sand (stop-motion static frame), then they disappear, then more laughs, and the whole sequence kind of ends... Deaths are hilarious as well, boiling pots, wooden stairs and fishnets attack people violently. Truly a campy flick, in every way possible. The soundtrack is almost entirely put together from songs of a group called "Cry No More". Pleasant enough 80's radio type of music, giving "Bloody New Year" its own theme song, "Recipe for Romance". The lyrics from that song inspired the name of this review. I have no idea wether the songs were written for the movie, or perhaps the other way around, but if it fits, it sits.

"Bloody New Year" is a silly horror movie that can surprise pleasantly, that is, if You are expecting something bad. So bad, that it is, in the end, actually somewhat okay. My rating: 4/10.