Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Happy Birthday To Me

Directed by J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear), Happy Birthday To Me was released in 1981 by Columbia Pictures during the so-called Golden Age of Slasher Films. The movie revolves around Virginia "Ginny" Wainwright and her rich, snobby friends who are among the elite at the illustrious Crawford Academy. After a prank at the local watering hole, Ginny starts to piece together some repressed memories of a mysterious accident that happened a few years earlier. At the same time, Ginny's friends begin to disappear, each seemingly killed off in a bizarre fashion. Happy Birthday To Me definitely strives to be an atmospheric slasher, not content to rely solely on boobs and blood. All in all, the movie is somewhat hampered by a lengthy running time, a lack of proper plotting, and some haphazard twists at the end.

Rating: 65%

(Image from movietrimmer.com)

2 comments:

DCP said...

You should review April Fool's Day. I still can't reconcile the end of that movie with everything else that goes on in it.

Quammy said...

I found that the ending to April Fool's Day made a lot more sense than the ending to Happy Birthday to Me. At least with April Fool's Day, they more or less had the ending in place from the beginning. With Happy Birthday To Me they had an ending, but the producers wanted a twist, so they shoehorned it in without making it part of the plot. It just comes out of nowhere.