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Happy Birthday To Me
[Sony Pictures]
1981; color
Directed by J. Lee Thompson
Starring: Melissa Sue Anderson, Glenn Ford & Tracey E. Bregman
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Shot in 1980, at the very dawn of the DDB, Happy Birthday To Me bears closer resemblance to the giallos that preceded it then it does the slasher flicks that followed it. Set at an exclusive private school (which I'm pretty certain is a high school not a college, even though the seniors all drink at the local tavern with the administration's knowledge and consent; ahhh, the halcyon days when most states had a drinking age of 18 and let you knock 'em back if you were 16) where the top students hang together in a wealthy, snooty clique, we get a mounting body count comprised of those same honors students. The cops and the school authorities think the kids are just mysteriously missing, so no one really raises an eyebrow until much later in the game; i.e., when it's way too late. Starring the unlikely pairing of legit screen legend Glenn Ford and Little House On The Prairie's Melissa Sue Anderson (as a psychiatrist and his teenaged patient, respectively), we learn she's got a seriously repressed memory of a traumatic event a few years earlier. Said repressed memory gradually (and by gradually, I mean at an excruciatingly slow pace) comes back to her and it is revealed that she and her mom were in a bad car accident that killed mom and caused her to have massive brain trauma and be the guinea pig for a new type of brain regeneration / rehabilitation treatment. (There's a lot more to it than that, as we learn later on, but that's all any interested viewer really needs to know at first.) While the killer does wear black gloves and we do get his / her POV quite a bit, a la giallo, we also get numerous clear-as-day shots of the killer in action, which leans more toward the slasher side of things. Confusing to be sure, because why would the killer's identity seemingly be hidden after it's been revealed? Maybe, because hardly anything is as it seems in this rough-around-the-edges flick. We get death by motorcycle (albeit in a rather unexpected manner), strangling, stabbing, bludgeoning, drowning and the death-by-shish-kebob famously depicted on the movie's poster. (Of course the poster art and the actual kebob of death bear little, if any, resemblance—but that's just a technicality.) It all builds to a surprise ending that truly rockets out of left field, but it does throw the whole litany of events which precede it into a completely different light. Recommended more as a curiosity than a must-see, but definitely not one to be passed up.
—the Kommandant
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