Norman J. Warren

  • Prey (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) As far as low-budget horror films of the 1970s go, Prey definitely has a lot more going on than you’d expect. Yes, it does remain a shoddily shot, amateurishly edited, incomprehensibly written video nasty. On the other hand, it gleefully goes digging into psychosexual dynamics, as it features a couple of antagonistic lesbians whose isolated existence (in a vast country house) is disrupted by a tall mute stranger who ends up being a flesh-eating alien on a mission to investigate whether humans can make a tasty treat. Much of Prey thus has a strong symbolic component, what with the lesbian characters being threatened by a male intrusion. For such a dirt-cheap film, it carries some unexpected baggage that may make the entire thing less painful to take in. Still, let’s not kid ourselves: the film, as presented, is a tough watch—not just because of the gory violence and nihilistic ending, but the crude nature of the images and the shoestring production. (Fittingly, director Norman J. Warren would go on to make the higher-budgeted but much more reprehensible Inseminoid.) Still, I got much more out of Prey than I expected, and that does count for something.

  • Bloody New Year (1987)

    Bloody New Year (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) The early 1980s were filled with slasher films focusing on specific “days” of the year, so it’s a bit of a surprise to see the British still at it five years after the end of the subgenre with Bloody New Year. To be fair, you can’t really fit this film in slasher horror: there’s more ambition on display here with a plot that has to do with a 1950s hotel preparing for a New Year’s bash, a secret government research project, and 1980s students falling into a supernatural time warp that erases the boundaries not only between decades, but also between basic logic and plausibility. Once you clear away the premise, Bloody New Year is another one of those “weird stuff happens” kind of horror films without any internal coherency as to what is happening or why: Stuff Happens, people die and that’s really what you need for a horror film, right? At least the scares are supernatural: we’re not stuck with the dull psycho with a knife. Unfortunately, the arbitrary nature of the set-pieces undermines their efficiency: when anything and everything can happen, we’re simply along with the ride rather than actively invested in how the protagonists will understand, fight back and try to escape the situation in which they are. When the screenwriter is so obviously biased against them in favour of his Weird Stuff Happening, it does almost extinguish the reason why we should be watching. What doesn’t help the handful of mildly interesting set-pieces are the film’s very-ultra low production values. Director Norman J. Warren can’t afford to properly portray its best sequences, and ambition will only carry you so far when execution simply can’t meet the demands of the film. If I’ll grant that Bloody New Year ends up being slightly more interesting than the holiday-themed slasher I was expecting, it did not exceed those expectations by much.