You'll pray for Thursday!
This is a movie which--I think--tries to tackle some serious issues and then swiftly decides it cares about other things. Bloody Wednesday was based in part on the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre, perpetrated by an anti-government survivalist named James Huberty. I think director Mark G. Gilhuis wanted to raise some questions about the nature of mental illness, both how it can make people do horrible things but also expose how horrible loved ones can be once they find out the sufferers have it. Instead, we got a stupefying dark comic movie about public nudity and talking teddy bears.
Harry Curtis is an auto mechanic who loses his job for disassembling a rich client's car, and then forgetting how to put it back together. This incident, coupled with his sudden nude appearance at a church service, are enough to get him institutionalized. Because this is a horror movie, it doesn't take long before the hospital overcrowds and they have to evict some of the patients. Harry is discharged against the head doctor's better judgment, and Harry's brother Ben somehow manages to put Harry up in an old abandoned hotel, where his only company is his stuffed bear Teddy. Who talks. He talks in this high-pitched squeaky dub which will sell you on this movie at once. Harry has to face the perils of the hotel, like punks who keep breaking in to murder him, and ghosts who reenact their suicides. Eventually, he decides to reintegrate with the outside world, and when that doesn't work, he decides to bring a rifle into the local cafe.
First of all, it needs to be said that I really wish I knew how coincidental the resemblances between Bloody Wednesday and The Shining are. Most things in Bloody Wednesday are hazily defined, and so its commonalities with that more famous film are tenuous--less like plagiarism, and more like Gilhuis watched The Shining late one night while high and had a nightmare about it. That may simply be Gilhuis succeeding in hiding his plagiarism, but I don't know--I guess the fact that there are relatively few dreamy haunted hotel films is probably a factor. This movie is like a dream, and it's up there now with the other movies I call "Hotel California Movies," about hotels or missions or both that have particularly weird hauntings. The other notable entry in this sub-genre is 1974's Moonchild (and there's also the webcomic Nan Quest).
Bloody Wednesday is a movie that substitutes characterization and sentiment for mugging and pants-pissing. It never really tries to be artistic, and doesn't really succeed at being such accidentally. But it's captivating, and that's usually better than being artistic. There's always something unexpected happening onscreen, like Gretta and The Telephone Book; never does it let up. The plot meanders where it pleases, which may be a turn-off for you if you're lame. Events keep piling up until we are forced to confront the subplot wherein Harry is looking for the lost wealth of one of the hotel's suicide ghosts...the lost wealth of a man named Mr. Burns. Mr. Burns even looks like his more famous name-sharer, and this movie hit home video just a year before The Simpsons' Mr. Burns appeared. Did Matt Groening see this movie late one night? Was the curse carried even further...?
The movie does touch on some serious topics. Ableism against the mentally ill, both systemic and individual. Homelessness among the mentally ill. Emotional and sexual abuse of men by women. The ease of obtaining guns in the United States. The inefficiency and apathy of the police. And it does present these topics with complexity. We end up sympathizing with Harry, after all, even though we're warned at the beginning that the movie ends with him shooting a bunch of people. The massacre lasts for a long time and it is pretty darn violent, to say nothing of the fact that the event it was based off of was even more traumatic. All sympathy for him vanishes at that point. It's a pretty cynical ending--we see a man tortured by violence turn into the very thing which tormented him. Is it right that he was harassed and abused for his illness? No. Is it right that he took his frustration and fear out on others? No.
So, yeah, this movie is pretty cynical...except it also isn't. The moments like Harry walking naked through church, or the close-ups of the outline of his peen as a snake crawls up his leg, and hell, even some of the violence at the end, are all pretty hilarious, if occasionally harrowing. This is a weird shot-on-video non-slasher which feels as scuzzy and cheap as some of its other SOV brethren like 555 and Sledgehammer. And it is way more stupefying than many of its video horror cousins, being something like The Shining squared. Or cubed. Everything is a non sequitur; scenes don't rationally follow each other, and it's never made clear what is and isn't a hallucination. For example, are there paranormal events at the hotel? Or are they just products of Harry's delusions? Is this a Jack Torrance-type scenario, where the ghosts are making an extant problem worse?
There are some other questions, too, like why a closed hotel still has electricity and running water, and why the police have no problem with Harry living there. These are more minor mysteries, having more rational answers, but that they aren't answered onscreen on in dialogue adds to the dreaminess of the whole affair. It's delicious.
Bloody Wednesday is a greatly entertaining piece of violence squashed to trash, made powerless by the power of extremely cheap cinema. Imagination runs wild, and divorces the finished product from reality. It's always nice to see that sort of severance enacted, even when the source material isn't something gruesome. Maybe you'll want Thursday to wait awhile anyway.
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