Welcome back, flapjacks! Sorry I’ve been away so long because I was hospitalized for a few weeks. I think Delores gave me food poisoning… or maybe she turned into a Trancer and hit me over the back of my head with a frying pan. Either way, I’m back to serve another Short Stack! Be mere coincidence, the first two Short Stack movie blog reviews of the year both contained the word “Bloody” in the title, so I figured what the hell, I’ll make this the year of “Bloody Reviews” and try to only cover movies with the word “Bloody” in the title. Seeing as today is a Wednesday, I guess I’ll cover the direct to video 1988 horror flick, Bloody Wednesday.
The movie begins with a Star Wars style opening text crawl about coffee shops and the potential for someone to randomly walk in and shoot the place up and how this is one such tale. It’s sort of prophetic in a way predicting the rise in mass shootings in the future, but this movie was actually based on an incident where someone randomly walked into a McDonald’s and started shooting people. (Hey, if you’ve ever worked in fast food, you can relate.)
Anyways, the movie is about this guy who has a mental breakdown and consequently losses his job. He then attends church in his birthday suit. Wait, did I put in Bloody Birthday by mistake? (Don’t worry, I’ve slated that one to coincide with my birthday in November.) No surprise, he’s arrested and sent to a mental institute, but the forced female love interest doctor reluctantly decides to release him as long as he checks in twice a week in person.
His brother hooks him up with a room in this empty hotel his firm owns, and the weirdness continues to worsen from there. First, a snake slithers through his window, on the top floor, and past his bulge and towards his face. But it was actually just a blanket he coiled in his sleep the whole time. Then he discovers some hooligans breaking stuff in another room, who notice him and give chase, but he manages to call the police and they take the punks away as they vow their revenge. If that wasn’t bad enough, he starts to see ghosts in the hotel, including several that committed suicide or where murdered, and imagines seeing the doctor at her house.
Apparently, breaking and entering and vandalism weren’t severe enough crimes to keep the scoundrels in the slammer, as they break in and chase our protagonist around the hotel. Eventually, they corner him in his room, but he produces a revolver from his teddy bear. Hey, they put a zipper on the back of the it, so you know something is in the stuffed animal. Just like Wooley, he’s gone apeshit and ties them up, playing Russian Roulette with them before releasing them. I’d like to point out, that it took over forty minutes for something genuinely creepy or suspenseful to finally happen. Is it too late to review Bloody Birthday instead?
Now all I can think about is a slasher where Ted is an accomplice or imagined to be one.
He actually does visit the doctor, and they seem to hit it off… maybe. Who knows what’s real and in this guy’s head? But then it’s right back to being crazy as he contemplates buying an Uzi in front of a gun store. When he returns to the hotel, the ghost bellhop tells him of a hidden suitcase of diamonds belonging to a murdered guest that was never found; just what he needs to turn his life around! But that turns out to be filled with snakes, or an illusion. More on that in the closing thoughts.
To add to the protagonist’s troubles, his ex-wife threatens him, so he drowns her in his bathtub. Surprisingly, his brother fails to notice the body in the tub while he’s taking a piss next to it. Maybe it’s because he has vision like the camera in this shot where there is black in the upper and lower corners of the screen? Or maybe he didn’t kill his wife, who knows.
Can you hurry up and use that Uzi so I can finish this review already?
After his brother leaves, the head punk brings him that Uzi, and it’s almost time for that carnage the Star Wars text crawl read by Great Value John Larroquette alluded to earlier. His doctor thinks something is wrong with him and he could be dangerous, but kind of like a real police interaction she’s dismissed by the police. Turns out she was right, as he takes that Uzi and walks into a busy coffee shop, and somehow it takes a minute or so before anyone notices him their holding a submachine gun. He promptly unloads on the staff and patrons, mowing them down in a bloody spectacle. Eventually, he hesitates, perhaps grasping the atrocity he committed, which gives one customer the opportunity to emerge from hiding and shoot and kill him with his pistol, putting an end to his sad, tragic life.
Well, every now and then you find a straight-to-video film that is a gem. Unfortunately, Bloody Wednesday is not. It has an interesting premise but is a very slow film with many long, dull moments in between the action. Plus, the premise of an isolated man seeing things and drifting further into madness was done much better in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The performance of the actor’s ranges from mediocre to poor; heck, I couldn’t even remember the characters’ names nor be bothered to look them up for this Short Stack. The score is rather generic and nothing worth writing about on the internet… although I am for some reason. The film tries to make you think by having you question what is real or imagined by the character, but I found myself not caring to much due to poor execution on the film’s part. There are better films that accomplish this goal and create in the audience a vested interest to ponder such things.
Do the last five minutes with the coffee shop massacre make up for the rest of the movie’s shortcomings. Regrettably, they do not. It’s an interesting scene with plenty of blood, squibs, and mayhem with okay effects, but there are far better “last fifteen-minute movies” to watch for the ending, like Evilspeak. Overall, Bloody Wednesday is a dull, boring horror movie with a few interesting moments, but it’s not worth watching to see those moments. The story has a lot of promise to it, but it needed better implementation for it to reach its full potential.
Well, that’s all for now, flapjacks. I have two things I need to do now. First, I need to find Delores and singe that Trancer so she doesn’t send me to the hospital again. Second, I have to record our belated episode of the podcast. Where did Scary Perry wander off to? I hope he’s not spending all of his time at the rebuilt gas station. Anyways, it’s good to be back. Later, flapjacks!
Overall Rating: 1 ½ Pancakes
