Happy Birthday To Me
It really is something to see when a respected, Oscar-nominated director like J. Lee Thompson (Cape Fear ’61, Guns Of Navarone) takes on the slasher genre which was so prevalent in the early 80s. As a result, this film is certainly well-directed, with stylish and efficient touches that set it apart from many of the amateurs who took their stab at it. In the lead role of the teenage girl recovering from a brain injury who suddenly has her friends start being slaughtered, Melissa Sue Anderson (Mary Ingalls from Little House On The Prairie) is certainly beautiful and appealing, with sparkling blue eyes and an infectious pout that keeps the viewer rooted in her character even when things seem bleakest. Belonging to a circle of friends known as the “Top Ten” because they are the ten richest kids in her private school (which includes an ultra-nerdy kid) and played by such actors as Matt (Suburbia) Craven, future soap opera queen Tracy Bregman, and 80s b-movie princess Lisa Langlois (wasted in a nothing part). The murders themselves are somewhat twisted with decent gore, including the much-ballyhooed shishkabab murder that was used heavily to promote the film upon release in 1981. As an added bonus, we get Glenn Ford (obviously needing the money REALLY bad) as Melissa Sue’s psychiatrist who tries to help her deal with the hazy details surrounding the accident that caused her mother’s death and the previously mentioned injury, even as the “experimental” technique that was used to speed her recovery takes the film over the edge into ridiculous sci-fi territory. On that note, the film suffers from a somewhat slow, deliberate pace that makes the viewer long for more kills to speed things up, and the habit late in the film of having the lead character hallucinate some events becomes a bit much. Oddly enough, the film seems to blatantly give away the killer’s identity halfway through, until we get to the ridiculously bizarre ending that seems inspired by Scooby-Doo (think lifelike human latex masks that would put Ethan Hunt to shame), but at the same time the killer’s motive here would eerily foreshadow the exact same motive for the killer in Wes Craven’s Scream. In the end, one of the slightly better entries in the glut of slasher movies of the period, mostly due to the talent behind the camera…
7/10