Happy Birthday to Me (1981)

Hide your knives and...Shish Kebabs?!  

With my own b-day coming 'round the corner, I thought I would cover some movies with that particular topic as the theme. The first movie I'm writing about is Happy Birthday to Me, a 1981 teen slasher which was a product of its time. You have happy, bubbly teenagers in a clique with the one standoffish nerdy guy and they're all getting killed off one by one by one. In odd ways might I add. Overall I would say the story line is pretty unique and separates it from other slasher films, but the ending kind of leaves you feeling...well...somewhat cheated. Or that's how I felt. You definitely have to have a suspension of disbelief or else you'll be sitting there cursing the screen to damnation. As usual, if you haven't seen this movie and don't like spoilers, then go watch the movie and read no further.

The movie opens with a girl getting chased down and murdered on campus. Alright! Kills that happen in the first 5-10 minutes in a movie indicate that it will be promising. Right? As she looks at the killer, she is relieved, but not for long because then her throat is slashed wide open. This tells us that the killer is someone in the group that we are about to be introduced to...

Throat slashings galore! 

Ginny (aka Virginia) is our lead girl played by Little House on the Prairie actress Melissa Sue Anderson. We learn pretty fast that there is something unstable about her. Unstable as in bouts of memory loss, signs of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), and strange blackouts. After a little frat party prank at a pub near campus, Ginny and her group of friends take off in a hurry in their vehicles to cross over the double bascule bridge as both sides are lifting up. The car that Ginny is in is the last to go over and it's actually too high for the car to even try and make it over, but idiot driving the car does so, destroying his car in the process and destroying Ginny's brain. Her brain was already kinda fucked up, but it definitely ruined her night. I would have freaked out too, but she freaks out BIG TIME and runs home only to have an argument with her father. A not very interesting one, but at least we learn that Ginny's mom is dead. Yes, now the pieces are coming together.

More pieces of Ginny's dementia start to come together during a science class experiment. Everyone's laughing and having a good time, but not Ginny as she stares at a frog's leg getting zapped with an electrical charge causing nerves to make the dead frog move. This somehow triggers buried memories from a time when she was unconscious, but this is a great way to introduce to us that she suffered some sort of brain damage in an accident a year before and is being treated with different neurological tests to help regain her consciousness. In her flashback, as she sits up from what appears to be an MRI, she stammers the words, "My Birthday"

After this memory comes to her, Ginny tells her therapist, Dr. David Faraday (Glenn Ford) that she is remembering things from her past more and more through visual stimuli (I'm speaking like a true psychologist here, right? Ha!). He informs her that there were tests done on her that had never been done before but the tests were beneficial to her as she is slowly remembering things about her past that she had since forgotten.


As the film progresses, we witness more and more memories coming to Ginny. We also witness more and more of her friends getting murdered. So let's talk about this for a bit as these are the most interesting parts of the movie. First of all, personally, there is no one really likable in this film. They're all really self-absorbed assholes who don't really care about each other. I mean, people keep turning up missing and are gone for DAYS and all they care about are dirt bike rallies, soccer games, and hanging out. Speaking of dirt bikes, here's your next kill. One of the guys has his dirt bike lifted off the ground with the engine going, causing the wheels to spin. Our antagonist appears from behind and you can only guess what's going to happen from there...

Here, let me help you throw in the towel. Or shall I say, scarf?

Good-bye, whoever you are...were, I mean.

Remember the gaping throat wound at the beginning of this blog? We later find out more about that girl. Her name is Bernadette and while Ann (Tracey E. Bregman) and Ginny are pilfering through the standoffish guy's place they think they find her head but it turns out Alfred (standoffish guy) made a bust of her head. This is a great example of the kinda lame attempts of scaring the audience, but at least there's a little splatter on the platter.

Head of the table 

Perhaps the best kill, in my opinion, is the guy lifting weights. Oh, and notice I'm not really keeping up with names here. You don't have to. Like I said, these people are expendable. Anyway, the guy is lifting weights and our antagonist returns once again from the shadows to serve as a spot, but instead the killer moves the bar and leaves the guy with a heavy set of weights on his hands. That's bad enough, but then the guy gets a weight dropped on his crotch while he's struggling to not drop the weight on himself. Needless to say the blow to his crotch also caused a blow to his neck.

Spot? More like spots of blood all over your shirt! 

Okay, so it seems that at this point all I care about are the kills. Well, this is true. Think about it, more people are getting killed but everyone just thinks they're all missing. Are they really this stupid, or do they just not care? What bastards. Makes them out to be worthless characters and it makes the story even less feasible when you think about it. Not even a dance will stop them from wondering what happened to everyone who has turned up missing. Also, they even go out of their way to prank Ginny because they realize that she's unstable. Heartless assholes.

So let's cut ahead to the infamous shish kebab scene. You know, this was of course the first image I ever saw of the film and it never really appealed to me. I didn't even rent this sonuvabitchin' movie until I was around 14 because the box cover made me want to keep passing it up. Upon my first viewing, I thought the film should have been represented better. BUT, the scene is awesome because another unlikable character gets killed. The breakdown: Ginny leaves with a dude from the dance, they sit in front of a fire eating shish kebabs and as she feeds him she jabs him through the back of the throat with the skewer. Yep. That's about all the happens.

Grillin' and killin' 

The next morning Ginny's all groggy like she just killed someone or something.

Or did she?

I might as well just reveal everything and end this blog because this movie is too damn long to really give a proper synopsis. And to be honest I like the movie, but not that much to sit and type for another hour about it. So...

Ginny's mom is a drunk and everyone knows it and throws Ginny a birthday party. No one goes because they are at some other rich kid's party. Ginny's mom, in a drunken rage, drives Ginny to the party and demands they let Ginny join the festivities but they aren't even allowed through the gate sending Ginny's mom into more of a rage driving them onto the bascule bridge we saw earlier in the movie. Here's the significance to Ginny's freak out; her mother drives the car up there and the car gets stuck and then the car falls into the water. Ginny's mother tells Ginny to try and swim to the surface and she does. Whew.

So who has been killing everyone? Ginny? No. Ann. Who's Ann? Exactly! Only she has a skin-tight mask that she wears to look like Ginny and drugged Ginny so that she would black out while Ann replaced her in these silly scenarios. Such as the shish kebab scene. Suspension of disbelief is a good thing right about now considering the actress who plays Ann has huge teeth and her voice changes when her unrealistic mask is pulled off. All of this is bad, but the reasoning behind it all is terrible. Ann killed all of these kids, as Ginny, and sat them all around a table. According to Ann as she talks to Ginny, they are there "to watch you die!". Turns out they're half sisters and she didn't like dealing with Ginny's insanity. Oh, and then Ann tells Ginny that she set this all up to look like murder and then suicide. Even though the other bodies have been dead for days. Doesn't make a lot of sense but it's an early '80s slasher that I can't help but enjoy from time to time even though it really is fucking stupid when you rule everything out.

Ann tries to kill Ginny, Ginny kills Ann, and as she stands bloody over Ann's body and surrounded by other dead bodies, she is conveniently caught - making her out to be the murderer. Thanks for the stupid twists and the bleak ending. Ever feel like you've been cheated? I have many times, and this is one of those times.

Keep your ears peeled for a nifty creepy ditty at the end aptly titled "Happy Birthday to Me". Do I hate the movie? No. But it's not one that I throw on often. Come back in a night or two and I'll tell you about the best of all birthday movies. Well, one of them anyway.