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Every filmgoer has a couple of movies lodged half-remembered in the nether regions of his mind that left a deep, scarring impact, forever altering the way your brain synapses fire. Something that you stayed up late to see, something that scarred the ever-living crap out of you, long before you built up enough resistance to laugh your ass off through the unrated cut of Dead Alive. Maybe it was a re-run of "The Hitchhiker" or a Friday the 13th sequel. Sometimes you can't even remember the title. I can. When I was a kid, Happy Birthday to Me fucked me up real good. I remember seeing about half of it at my friend Corey's house, him fast-fowarding to the gory bits, delighted that they scared me. Watching the film again tonight for the first time in 12+ years, I felt a sweep of nostalgia. I was confronting a film that had impacted me deeply. Back then, the mere sight of a handful of its frames had left me quivering with morbid dread. That motorcycle death is forever etched into my brain; thanks, Corey.
Lo and behold, it's not too bad. Actually, I was surprised. Journeyman director J. Lee Thompson (a hack--he did every other Charles Bronson movie that Mike Winner didn't do) takes a stab at the 80s slasher boom in his typical workman-like fashion. Even his usual sleaze factor (get a load of 10 To Midnight with Bronson) takes a backseat to suspense and atmosphere. Sure, some of the edits are as clumsy as your fist kiss, and the shots appear to have been dreamed up on the spot, but the film is creepy and effective, and the setting is unusual for the genre. The characters are fairly realistic, with admirably-restrained acting from a cast that includes a slumming Glenn Ford and Melissa Sue Anderson from "Little House on the Prairie." So we have a group of elite prep school kids getting bumped off one-by-one while Virginia (Anderson), with the help of her shrink (Ford), struggles with some half-remembered trauma. The flashbacks are fantastic and well-reasoned, unique in the genre. However, the double-twist ending is a bit much. In fact, the movie blows it with its own silly wrap-up. Triva: J. Lee Thompson was the model for the character of Burke Dennings in The Exorcist--Friedkin even offered him the part, but he turned it down. >>Back<< >>Archive Index<< |
