Happy Birthday To Me (1981)
Dir. J. Lee Thompson
Written by Timothy Bond,
Peter Jobin, John Saxon (not that one), possibly also John Beaird (uncredited)
Somewhere in the enchanted land of Being An Obscenely
Rich Person, ten school friends are part of an insufferable clique universally
known as the “top ten.” Or, after the first few minutes, nine. Because on
the way to meet the others, one of them (Lesleh Donaldson, FUNERAL HOME,
CURTAINS) is butchered by a killer whose face she recognizes but we never see.
In short order, her comrades also begin to meet their ends courtesy of a
mysterious off-camera miscreant, and the killer just might be someone within
the group. But...but... who? On a completely unrelated note, our
protagonist Ginny (Melissa Sue Anderson, NBC’s Little House On The Prairie)
has just returned to school under vague and suspicious circumstances, and she
is currently suffering from a tragic medical condition known as “narratively
expedient amnesia,” which fortunately is almost always temporary, and often
miraculously cured right at the start of the third act. And also, not to put
too fine a point on it, but she’s been blacking out a lot, and her on-call
psychologist (a very-much slumming and not-at-all-happy-about-it Glenn Ford,
THE BIG HEAT) seems a little anxious about what she might remember.
What follows, then, is a perfectly enjoyable And Then
There Were None riff, with the movie pushily directing our attention
towards this red herring character or that as they get bumped off in
impressively imaginative ways one by one. The characters are not exactly
likable (and how could they be, since the movie faints towards nearly all of
them as the killer at one point or another! Not that, frankly, we were ever
going to take the bait and think Rudi did it, come on guys.), but at least
they’re distinct and easy enough to differentiate. And the kills are, by and
large, exemplary; in the deluge of slashers which followed HALLOWEEN’s success
(1980 had seen the release of TERROR TRAIN,
NEW YEAR’S EVIL, TO ALL A GOODNIGHT, CHRISTMAS EVIL, HE KNOWS YOU’RE ALONE,
PROM NIGHT, MOTHER’S DAY, DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE,
NIGHT OF THE DEMON, MANIAC, and FRIDAY THE 13th, just to name a few) the rules
of what exactly a slasher film fundamentally was were still being
written on the fly, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME was clearly a trailblazer in its
understanding of the paramount importance of frequent, gimmicky kill scenes.
Most memorable, of course, is the movie’s trademark shish-kabob death, but a
guy who gets his face ripped off by a motorcycle (and hey, more dirt bike
racing! Never picked up what a common horror trope this apparently is!) and a
guy who gets his dick smashed while weightlifting also deserve a stirring
commendation.
The kills are presented
just a shade more seriously than you might expect, though; HALLOWEEN was still
in the air, and a lingering professionalism left over from the gritty,
self-serious 70’s cinema is still evident in the production, which doesn’t
reflect any real awareness of its potential as flamboyant high camp. Subsequent genre filmmakers would latch onto the same impulse for outrageous grand guignol, but
would eventually find their way to a tone of cartoonish, gleeful overkill that better
suits this kind of preposterous schlock. But that hadn't happened yet; HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, then, is something of a relic
of a subgenre still emerging from the primordial muck, torn between its impulse
to shock you with over-the-top kills, and its instinct towards normal tactful
artistry which would eschew lingering pornographically on the violence for its
own sake. Obviously they should have fully embraced the trash once they had
committed to this baseline level of ridiculousness, but I can see how they wouldn’t
have known better at the time, and it makes the film an interesting artifact
from a genre still in transition.
This is true of the portrayal of violence, and equally true with regards to the structure here, which
really invests in its ridiculous whodunnit angle, an absolute mainstay of the
Italian giallo cycle but ultimately not a quintessential element of the
American Slasher film. In fact, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME feels, in many ways, like
it’s inspired more by gialli than by HALLOWEEN: its interest in opulent
wealth, its mystery plot and endless red herrings, its insistence on its
convoluted and ludicrous psychology, its varied and colorful death scenes, and
(especially) its breathtaking, violent spasm of out-of-the-blue insanity
passing itself off as a conclusion, all have more in common with the fey
psycho-horror of 70’s Italian cinema than the more straightforward
blood-and-guts delivery system of the 80’s slasher.
Of course, I’m not sure
any self-respecting giallo would center itself around this group of dorks.
Which raises a question that gnawed at me throughout the film: what are
these kids, exactly? They drive cars, and drink beer at a bar (and then drive
cars), but they go to something called “The Crawford Academy,” where they’ve
been going for at least four years, and many but not necessarily all of them
seem to live at home with their parents. None of them appear to have jobs of
any kind, but the campus of their school is gigantic, with a huge multi-story
library. None of them seem to be training to be wizards*, so I can only assume
this is some kind of non-magical rich kid high school? I looked it up and it turns
out the drinking age was not raised to 21 until 1984, so I guess it fits, but
man, this is not how I remember high school. Or actually college, for that
matter. Or, in a more general sense, human existence. I don’t know if my upbringing was a lot more atypical than I
assume, or if this was just normal life for every American in 1981, or if it’s
just that these people behave like no human being that ever lived. But in a
month of watching nothing but incompetent movies about impossible things, I
found these characters among the most inscrutable elements I encountered.
Anyway, your enjoyment
of the movie is probably going to have less to do with how much you identify
with these rich-ass Hogwarts weirdos and more to do with how much tolerance you have
for a flagrantly unfair whodunnit that cheats shamelessly at every turn to try
and trick you about who the killer is, and then in the end it’s just a bunch of
crazy random nonsense they wrote on the fly which has nothing to do with
anything that came before. They employ every dirty trick in the book;
menacingly shooting characters doing things that look suspicious because they
haven’t shown you the benign context, having the killer do a bunch of shit that is retrospectively impossible, having characters act sinister and threatening out of the
blue for a scene or two for absolutely no reason, lingering on an overwrought
flashback mystery that doesn’t turn out to be important, having characters prank each
other with dead body parts stolen from the morgue or medical school (or
whatever the fuck they have wherever this weird place is supposed to be) during
the same week their friends are mysteriously vanishing without a trace.
It’s all terribly unfair
and shamelessly manipulative, but credit the filmmakers for this: it works. Whether you want to or
not, they’ll have you guessing about who the killer really is (not that you’d
be able to guess from the information provided) and the movie does a surprisingly
effective job of subtly and smoothly shifting your suspicions amongst the
numerous red herring characters. Director J. Lee Thompson was an old British
pro (he did the original CAPE FEAR and THE GUNS OF NAVARONE before becoming Charles
Bronson’s go-to guy, making nine movies with him between ‘76 and ‘89); no one's definition of an artist, but certainly a reliable craftsman with a solid work ethic and no pretensions that he's better than this garbage. He already had in excess of three dozen movies under his belt as director (he has a screenwriting credit from 1937), and, unless you're Jim Wynorski or someone, you don't make that many movies without at least learning something about the craft. This is by no means a classy production, but it does contain a certain level of unpretentious professionalism that sets it apart from many of its slasher brethren which were thrown together by ambitious amateurs. Even though the movie makes no sense and it was apparently being
rewritten right up to the final scene being shot, it’s very competently
assembled and confidently paced. I don’t know if something this dumb benefits
enormously from that kind of workmanship, but this is definitely a real movie
that you could show to normal people without them thinking you’re some kind of
fringey psychopath who’s into deviant, perverse masochism in entertainment. It
even has a few suspense sequences (particularly the first kill) which could be
taken completely seriously in that regard. Overall it’s a lumpy, schlocky mess, but
scene-by-scene it’s legit and occasionally even effective.
The final explanation
makes not a lick of sense, and turns out to have nothing to do with the
flashbacks, repressed memories, or birthday parties, or anything else.** But
it’s audacious enough that I’m willing to let that go. A mystery this nutty was
never going to have a good solution, so in some ways a completely insane and
arbitrary one is actually better. The movie has one absolutely inexcusable
failing, though: there are ten friends in the circle who start getting bumped
off. But in the end, only seven get killed! Three at least don’t turn up for the
finale, and apparently survive! There is a vague possible reason for this (possible SPOILERS: they weren’t attending the school back when the inciting party took
place?) but come on! Let’s go for 100% completion here. I get that slashers
were still finding their feet in 1981, but leaving obvious bodycount
uncollected was never acceptable.
*Although magic is
probably the best explanation for the reveal of how the killer pulled it off,
so I’m not entirely ruling it out.
** In fact, the
overly-chatty, very insider-baseball-heavy and completely unsourced wikipedia
page, as well as the IMDB trivia section (impossible to know which was ripped
off the other, but they obviously have the same source), claim that the final
ending was completely re-written on the fly at the last minute when the
original ending that literally everything else in the movie seems to be
pointing to was ditched as “not climactic enough.” That was probably a bad move
if they wanted to leave the film with anything resembling internal cohesion, but
it was just as well for history, because this doozy of an ending is crazy and
random enough I’m much more likely to remember it.
CHAINSAWNUKAH
2018 CHECKLIST!
Searching For Bloody
Pictures
TAGLINE
|
Six of The Most
Bizarre Murders You Will Ever See. Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but at least three are real
hum-dingers. And I appreciate that they at least know what I want to see.
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TITLE ACCURACY
|
There is a birthday
party which features heavily in the backstory and the finale, but it, too, is
a red herring
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LITERARY ADAPTATION?
|
No
|
SEQUEL?
|
None
|
REMAKE?
|
None
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COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
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USA
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HORROR SUB-GENRE
|
Slasher, Whodunnit, And
Then There Were None ripoff.
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SLUMMING A-LISTER?
|
Glenn Ford, of all
fool people.
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BELOVED HORROR ICON?
|
None
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NUDITY?
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None
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SEXUAL ASSAULT?
|
No, although a French
guy breaks into Ginny’s house to steal her underwear(?!)
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WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!
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No
|
GHOST/ ZOMBIE /
HAUNTED BUILDING?
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No
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POSSESSION?
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No
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CREEPY DOLLS?
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None
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EVIL CULT?
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None.
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MADNESS?
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Crazed killer
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TRANSMOGRIFICATION?
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A very, very convincing
mask.
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VOYEURISM?
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None
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MORAL OF THE STORY
|
Even if you are ahead
of the curve enough to know the real draw here is a series of colorful
murders, still maybe plan out the ending of your whodunit ahead of time,
yeah?
|
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