Review of Happy Birthday to Me (1981) by Vince K — 08 Feb 2010

I always look forward to more slasher flicks from the '80s that I've never seen before. I've queued Silent Night, Deadly Night, Sleepaway Camp, Witchboard, My Bloody Valentine, and a few others.

So when I heard Happy Birthday To Me was finally being released on DVD, I couldn't resist. I should've, because this is probably the worst movie I have seen from the whole decade of the '80s.

First off, it's from the makers of the original My Bloody Valentine, which I have heard is one of the rare cases where the remake is much better than the original. Second off, I was expecting something totally different.

Maybe the cover art that featured someone skewered with a shishkebab through the mouth was misleading. I thought it would be more like, I don't know, Eli Roth's fake trailer for "Thanksgiving" on the Grindhouse movie.

You know, like a birthday party that goes horribly awry where the guests get picked off one by one, and it would be campy and funny. Instead the plot is so complex, as are the characters. It is very hard to follow.

It's about 10 college (or high school?) students who are in a private school in America? (It seems like they're in England or Ireland because all the faculty have accents.) When members of the group start getting killed off for no reason you kind of scratch your head a little.

And when you see only the killers hands in black gloves it reminds you completely of a Dario Argento movie (all the killers' hands in Argento's films were his own). It turns out one of the students is the killer, which is confusing since so many of the other students appear to be the killer by joking around by coming at eachother with knives and showing off fake decapitated heads, and you don't know they're joking because of the ominous music playing.

SPOILERS AHEAD YOU SHOULD READ - Turns out the female lead character is the killer (maybe?) since she had a bad accident on her birthday a year ago and had to have brain surgery that made her so brain crazy that she's either hallucinating these killings or actually doing them herself.

At the end of a VERY long runtime (for one of these types of movies), it is revealed that her TWIN SISTER is the killer. She sets up all the dead corpses of her friends at the table for their birthday party, in what is probably the only good visual alluding to the title in the whole movie.

But wait, the twin sister pulls off a latex mask, revealing that she is NOT her twin sister, but someone else (uh, WHO?) Someone who is still her sister, but not her twin? It's so fucking confusing.

And none of the death scenes are all that great, just some stabbings, throat slashings, and a weight lifter having his barbell crushed his throat. Happy Birthday To Me is a bad movie from a good era that is best to be forgotten.

Although I'd bet you anything they'll be doing a remake of it soon.