Tuesday, October 2, 2012

October 2012 Edition #2: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME






Director: J. Lee Thompson
Screenplay: John Saxton, Peter Jobin and Timothy Bond
Starring: Melissa Sue Anderson, Glenn Ford, Lawrence Dane, Sharon Acker
Release Date: May 15, 1981



Today’s SIHS entry comes from the golden age of Hollywood’s slasher boom, that crazy period from 1979 to 1986 when a new entry in the holiday-themed stalk-and-kill genre was released literally every week. In the wake of HALLOWEEN’s success audiences were subjected to an onslaught of knife-wielding, mask-wearing, black glove-clad, power tool-misusing madmen (and sometimes women) intent on the wholesale slaughter of every teenager who even briefly entertained the notion of having unsatisfying sex in the constricted backseat of a station wagon in the woods while smoking reefer and listening to that sweet Journey/Foreigner/Night Ranger mixtape they made for their girlfriend. In quick succession, money-hungry independent production companies cranked out flicks with gimmicky titles like PROM NIGHT, GRADUATION DAY, NEW YEAR’S EVIL, FRIDAY THE 13th and, most terrifying of all, THE STAR WARS CHRISTMAS SPECIAL. Somewhere in the middle of all this, a little production outfit based in Canada cranked out two of their own back-to-back, both of which have gained esteem among the horror community throughout the years. The movies were MY BLOODY VALENTINE, and the subject of this review, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, which features, hands-down, probably my favorite poster art of any film in the slasher genre. I remember seeing the box art in video stores when I was a kid and being taken aback at how utterly horrifying and darkly comical the image was. Slasher flicks were never really my bag back then, though, so the movie never topped my list of shit I absolutely had to watch, at least not until now. So, did the filmmakers actually deliver on the promise of the poster to deliver “six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see!”? To that I say, hell yes! Was it any good?…..that’s a bit more complicated.




Let’s start with the movie’s plot. Holy shit, is it complicated! Let’s see, um, well, it begins with a young girl named Bernadette (Lesleh Donaldson) leaving the grounds of Crawford Academy, the fancy private school she attends, to meet her friends at the tavern. After being inexplicably lassoed with a dog leash (I shit you not!) and berated by her headmistress, Bernadette gets into her car and is attacked by an unseen, black glove-clad assailant who strangles her for a bit before chasing her down and, ultimately, slicing her throat with a razor blade. Cut to the tavern, where Bernadette’s friends are enjoying a few beers while simultaneously pissing off the locals. Among the group we’ve got the prototypical jock Rudi (David Eisner), class clown Steven (Matt Craven), nebbish and nerdy  Alfred (played by Keith Gordon look-alike Jack Blum), and three or four other Blandy McBlandington’s who exist only to be killed later on in the flick. They’re all awaiting the arrival of Virginia (LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE’S Melissa Sue Anderson), the newest inductee into their group, the Crawford “Top Ten”. Once they leave the bar the group decides to play a pants-shittingly stupid game involving leaping their cars over the gap on a drawbridge. The car carrying Virginia has a horrifying near-miss, barely crossing the gap and nearly crashing on the other side. The accident triggers a memory for Virginia that sends her fleeing the scene in hysterics. The next day she visits her psychiatrist, Dr. Faraday (Ford), and it is revealed that Virginia recently underwent some sort of experimental brain surgery following a mysterious accident in her past that ended up killing her mother. As her eighteenth birthday approaches and she struggles to recall what happened that night, her friends begin to disappear one by one, all victims of  the same black-gloved stranger who killed Bernadette. As her birthday nears, the body count rises, and Virginia begins to have strange black-outs. Is she the killer? Is her Dad the killer? What about Rudi? Or hey, maybe Alfred? Hey, maybe this is like a choose your own adventure movie, and YOU’RE the killer!




In case you couldn't tell from that last sentence, I have issues with this movie. But first, let’s get its positive qualities out of the way. First of all, I’d just like to say that director J. Lee Thompson directed the fuck out of this movie. A previous Oscar-nominee for such classics (and future SIHS entries) as THE GUNS OF NAVARONE and CAPE FEAR, Thompson was obviously slumming it with this one, but he brings plenty of stylistic flair and artistry to the film’s scenes of carnage. I particularly enjoyed the way he segued into the flashback scenes with abrupt dutch angles, fast cutting between the past and present, and eerie red lighting straight out of a Mario Bava flick. The murder sequences were completely devoid of tension, at least for me, but Thompson makes sure to cover them from the right angles and finds the right images to cap them all off with a splatterifically splashy punctuation mark. I also appreciated the appearance of Glenn Ford, who in his brief screen time turns in the movie’s best, most restrained performance without trying, and really classes up the joint. But mostly what this flick delivers on is the kills, and while they certainly weren’t the most “bizarre” murders I’ve ever seen, they were definitely damn effective, my favorites being a guy getting his face decimated by the spinning tire of a motorbike,  another dude who has weights dropped on his dick while doing a bench-press, thus causing him to drop the weights he was holding onto his face, and of course the kill that replicates what happens to the unfortunate fellow on the poster.




As far as delivering the slasher goods, this movie is a success. Where it falls apart for me is in the plotting. It’s a mess, man. This movie has three credited screenwriters, but it feels like the entire cast took a shot at writing this thing at some point during the production. It has the seed of a good idea with Virginia’s repressed memories and lengthy black-outs which happen to coincide with the murders, but all of that is undercut by the fact that everybody, and I literally mean every single character, is given a red-herring moment where it appears that they have been revealed as the killer. At one point two of the girls find Bernadette’s severed head in Alfred’s bedroom, and it is CLEARLY THE ACTRESS’S ACTUAL FUCKING HEAD! But when Alfred shows up to confront them, the movie cops out and reveals that he just happens to enjoy making molds of his friends faces. What….the…fuck?! Another character lures Virginia up to the bell tower in a church and makes vague threats with a knife, followed by a shot of blood splattering the floor. Virginia then spends the next ten minutes of the movie not knowing what happened up there, and the police add him to the missing persons list the next day, and then he just suddenly reappears and pretty much says “Hey, I cut my hand! What have you been up to?” And the characters just shrug it off, and then that very same character proceeds to disappear from the entire third act of the movie!




The flick is essentially a series of cheap fake-outs that clearly indicate the filmmakers had no clue as to how to end the picture. Seeing as how this mess is credited to three screenwriters, here’s what I think happened: the first guy came along and wrote a straightforward slasher flick about a girl suffering the side effects of intense brain surgery. Then screenwriter two and three come in and try to spice things up by adding useless subplots. Based on the evidence the film presents us, it is far too obvious that Virginia is the killer, so let’s make everybody a suspect! The real kick to the nuts out of all of this is the fact that the ending they finally settled on, and I’m not spoiling anything when I say this, has absolutely NOTHING to do with the brain surgery or ANY of the red herrings presented prior. The surgery is merely a plot device that allows the use of flashbacks to explain the killer’s motivation, sorta but not really. The final reveal of the killer’s identity, set at a birthday party populated by the corpses of Virginia’s friends, reaches SCOOBY-DOO levels of absurdity, even going so far as to include a ludicrously life-like face mask that goes beyond even what our technology is capable of today, let alone 1981. And the identity of the killer is made all the more confusing by the fact that they look identical to at least three other bland characters who have come and gone from the flick.



I should probably step back for a moment and say that I do not hate this movie. In fact, I feel that the ridiculous stupidity that makes up the movie’s final hour actually gives the flick a certain campy charm. In fact, I think that the very last shot of the movie is so awesome and unsettling that it made the whole thing worthwhile, even though it belonged in a much better movie. I just find it frustrating that the filmmakers, who were obviously somewhat talented, had so little respect for the intelligence of their audience that they relied so heavily on such lazy technique when it came to building a compelling mystery. There is a kernel of a classic horror movie buried in HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME. What we are left with is a schizophrenic mess, but hey, at least it’s a good time!


My Rating: 6.5/10







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