Dir. J. Lee Thompson
In the run up to her 18th birthday, Ginny (Melissa Sue Anderson) begins to experience bizarre blackouts and fragmented flashbacks of a traumatic event. To make matters worse, someone begins murdering her close circle of friends in morbidly inventive ways. Is Ginny responsible for the murders during her mysterious blackouts? Could the killer be someone from her past? Why is she unable to remember a significant event from the previous year? Ginny must work fast to figure out what's going on and unmask the killer before it's too late…
Released in the wake of the success of Halloween and Friday the 13th, Happy Birthday To Me is a typical example of the myriad slasher movies unleashed during the early Eighties. With every new title (usually referencing an anniversary or holiday or significant calendar date) the main focus of the slasher film, as established by Friday the 13th, was to drape its plot around a series of inventive death scenes; boasting all manner of splattery SFX, the kills became one of the main draws of the sub-genre. And Happy Birthday To Me sticks to the conventions of the slasher like glue. Opening with a fairly intense scene in which a young student is strangled by an unseen assailant hiding in the backseat of her car, Happy Birthday To Me gets off to a creepy enough start. The first murder is somewhat conventional compared to what comes after though... including outrageous deaths by motorbike engine, gym weights and shish kebabs (!).
The screenplay works hard to insinuate that any one of the wispily-drawn characters could be the killer, and from time to time various characters will have a random menacing expression on their face or say something that could be construed as threatening. We often cut away from a scene after it seems inevitable someone will be murderlised, only for that character to show up later, alive and well. Elsewhere, characters show up ‘dead’, only for it to be revealed as a practical joke. Too much time is padded out with the group of elitist friends as they goof around, and there is little tension in the build up to the murders. As a straight slasher it does at times have an appealing gothic ambience, particularly during the mist-enrobed graveyard scenes and morbidly atmospheric finale in which Ginny attends a party where the gathered guests are the mutilated corpses of her friends. At other times however, proceedings unfurl in the manner of a melodramatic soap-opera. There is much camp humour in these scenes, particularly the flashback scene in which Ginny’s histrionic mother knocks back the liquor and has an overwrought meltdown at the entrance to their mansion home during a rainstorm.
There's an underlying, scathing critique of the upper class characters throughout, with their inherited wealth and obnoxious privilege. Ginny and her friends all come from abundantly well-off families and spend much of their time being offensive and rude to other people. At one point the prim headmistress of their private college reprimands Ginny and quips: “Think you can sneer at others? You think that because you’re rich you can sneer at people who have had to work hard, people who have had to fight for a decent education? That you can just do as you please?”
Also of interest is the increasingly ambiguous depiction of Final Girl, Ginny. Initially sweet natured, Ginny eventually begins to change through the course of the film, becoming increasingly moody and volatile. The catalyst for this is when she and her friends race over a drawbridge in their cars as it lifts up, jumping the ever-widening gap. Something is triggered in her memory and she leaves her friends to run home, via a moody cemetery to visit her mother's grave. Throughout the film she has increasingly lengthy blackouts and flashbacks to the prior year, when she and her mother were in a car accident, resulting in her mother’s death. She also has memories of the experimental brain surgery she underwent; cue lingering shots of the operation. This all serves to throw doubt on her hitherto upstanding nature. To begin with, all this intrigue really enhances the narrative and counters the stop-start pacing. Who is Ginny? What happened to her? Why is she in therapy? However, events soon become bogged down in repetition, killing the momentum. The pace finally picks up towards the climax though, and things really get going.
Shameless in its camp audacity, and brazen enough to pull off that ‘what-the-fuck!?' revelation during the climax, Happy Birthday To Me is an entertaining ‘old-school’ slasher which makes attempts at originality with its wildly implausible twists and turns, moments of gothic horror, macabre humour and gruesome kills. And more red herrings than the National Library’s Agatha Christie collection. One of the most surprising elements of the film is that its director, J. Lee Thompson, previously directed Cape Fear (1962) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)!