Bloody New Year

Bloody New Year (1987)

Should old acquaintance be forgot? Or just brutally murdered.

A group of friends take refuge in an island hotel decorated for New Year's. The problem is, it's early summer, and soon enough, even the walls themselves are striking out against them.

Date of release
1987-05-11
TMDB
5.2 / 10 (82)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Horror
Director
Norman J. Warren

Casting

Interesting facts

Bloody New Year is a 1987 British supernatural horror film directed by Norman J. Warren and starring Suzy Aitchison, Nikki Brooks, Colin Heywood, Mark Powley, Catherine Roman and Julian Ronnie. The plot concerns a group of teenagers who are trapped in a haunted hotel on a remote island.

Production

Warren was approached by Maxine Julius to make a horror film for her and developed the plot over seven days with line producer Hayden Pearce. Bloody New Year was meant as a homage to 1950s B movies, the film being set on an island trapped in a time warp where it is always New Year's Eve, 1959. Originally the entire film was to have been set in the 1950s, but this idea was abandoned due to budget constraints.

Produced on an estimated £60,000 budget (about £179,000 in 2025), Bloody New Year began shooting in June 1986 and was filmed in four to five weeks. It was shot in and around the seaside resort of Barry Island in South Wales, with Friars Point House serving as the filming location for the Grand Island Hotel.

The film's opening credits play over black-and-white footage presenting the 1959 Grand Island Hotel New Year's Eve party. The extras playing the dancing hotel guests were members of a local rock 'n' roll preservation society and worked unpaid. The extracts from Fiend Without a Face were supplied free by its producer, Richard Gordon, a friend of Warren who had produced his earlier film Inseminoid.

Warren had envisaged a particularly bloody scene for the film's climax, where the zombified "Dad" (Steve Emerson) kills Rick by slicing his head with an outboard motor propeller. In the end, the violence was toned down to ensure that the British Board of Film Classification would award the film a 15 certificate instead of a more restrictive 18.

The electronic musical score for Bloody New Year was composed by Nick Magnus. The film features seven songs by Magnus and Chas Cronk's band Cry No More: "Recipe for Romance" (which accompanies both the opening and closing credits), "Boys Don't Cry", "Caveman Rock", "Jenny", "You're Not Fooling Me", "Every Single Time" and "When Love Is Not Enough".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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