You can really tell the people responsible for this movie cared way, way more about the poster than they did the final product. It's not an all time great or anything, but the image of a cake with bloody finger stumps for candles is at least somewhat eye-catching. I wouldn't watch it in the theater, but I might rent it if I saw it just sitting there on the shelf or in a Netflix queue. Tagline's a bit iffy, but when your movie premise hinges on such a weak concept, you've really gotta go with everything you can get.
In case it's not obvious, I'm not too partial towards 1981's Bloody Birthday, a mashup of the killer child and slasher genres that doesn't really pack the full punch of either.
Normally I wouldn't start things off with an openly negative opinion, since it's usually more interesting to get into the background details of production or some little quirk about alternate titles or something. But honestly, the only notable thing about Bloody Birthday's production history is how terribly non-notable any of it is. The director Ed Hunt - has exactly one credit to his name since 1995 (when he did an edutainment game for some live action Jungle Book TV show nobody remembers), and has a link on the Wikipedia page which goes to the wrong guy, as his page does not exist. The producer, Gerald T. Olson - an assistant producer on Repo Man and a second unit director on Dumb and Dumber. The actors - primarily TV actors or perennial background players. The distribution company - folded after releasing exactly one film. Absolutely nobody of any kind of note or significant value involved themselves with this product in any way, and yet enough lists aggregated to create TSZDT's top 1000 deemed this a worthwhile enough film to bring it up to the 997 spot in the first edition. What's worse, the second edition bumped it all the way up to 945!
Were the movie to have any major redeeming qualities, I might feel inclined to say something along the lines of "well let's see if any of them have a point," but convinced as I am of living in a world of raving lunacy right now, I won't entertain the notion that whoever counted Bloody Birthday as one of the greats was doing anything but taking the piss. That said, let's at least take a look at this thing and see if there's not at least some elements to scrape value from.
True terror, right there.
In the year of our Lord, 1980, something is wrong in the town of Meadowvale, California. Ten years prior, when a solar eclipse blocked Saturn from the sky, three children were born without any capacity for emotion or compassion. As they near their tenth birthday, a string of murders start up about town, sending the townsfolk into a completely tame and not at all panicked panic, sparking a nonexistent search for the murderer and totally not just sitting around going about their lives as per usual. Yessiree, they're definitely gonna DO something about this and not just blithely continue about their daily lives. And in the midst of all this 100% most surely not inactivity we're-actually-doing-something-ing, Timmy and Joyce Russel (KC Martel and Lori Lethin) are the only ones who remotely suspect the town's three little angelfaces of any wrongdoing. It's only a matter of time before their luck runs out, and the constant attempts of the brats from hell to off them finally amount to something...
This is not a movie for anyone looking for any sense of progression or tension. Aside from some half-hearted dialogue about how the stars plan out our entire lives before we're even born, there's never any reason given for why the three children suddenly decide to start murdering (unless you count the usual underlying assumption of "they're mentally ill, so of COURSE they kill people!" but that makes me want to put my head through the TV set, so I shan't count it), and there's never any real chance of them getting caught over it. Oh, there's plenty of occasions where someone walks in on them doing what is obviously the set-up for a murder, but as mentioned, everyone just seems to blithely brush it off. The murders only really take place whenever the filmmakers decide the movie's gone a little slack, and lack any kind of suspense as to who's gonna get it or how. They telegraph it all from a mile away, and after a while it just kind of gets tedious.
Even the one part of the film you'd expect to come to life and give a little bit of excitement or tension, the titular birthday, doesn't really have much going for it. It takes place around two-thirds into the movie, and nothing much of note happens aside from one of the kids PRETENDING to poison the icing so he can make everyone think Joyce is crazy. Beyond that, it's the exact same song and dance of the three kids standing around acting generically menacing, adults milling around talking about how hard they're working to solve the murders they are definitely investigating and not letting slide so they can sit around drinking more beer, and generally flat camerawork. The party being Mighty Mouse themed and some random clown who's on-screen for four seconds are the only interesting things about the entire sequence.
Hold the phone, boys, I think we've found the real killer here...
Of course, credit's due where credit's due - for as meandering, boring, and pointless as the film's plot can get, it isn't exposition heavy. Certain character relations and reactions are left unexplained, but the actors and writing at least pull enough of their weight for you to understand what's going on without needing an open, direct explanation. The evil children in particular are pretty good in this department, communicating their intent and thoughts on a wide variety of matters without needing to outright say, "I don't like you and want to murder you." Granted, the way the film plays out, that's practically the only reaction they have to anything, but given how difficult children reportedly are to coax good performances out of, I'll still congratulate the filmmakers for getting anything worthwhile out of them.
Actually, let's talk about the children for a moment, since I've gotten this far into the review without once mentioning their names or personalities.
You'll forgive me for not noticing there's a difference on those counts.
For this evening's entertainment, our murderers are as follows:
- Curtis (Billy Jayne), the brown-haired, glasses-wearing boy. Seems the de facto leader of the group, organizing most of their murders and directly causing the lion's share. Is a bit nerdy, but still manages to be quite popular with the kids in school. A genius at electrical engineering, and has a great fondness for pistols. Also a massive pervert for a ten-year old.
- Debbie (Elizabeth Hoy), the blonde girl of the group. Quiet and reserved. Most obsessed with death. Likes using a jumping rope to strangle her victims.
- Third child (Andy Freeman), who has no name or personality.
You can easily tell based on those descriptions who the best actors of the group were, and subsequently who gets the most screen time. I highly suspect the original draft of the script called for all three children to have roles of equal importance, but deep into production Hunt realized Andy Freeman wasn't very good and wasn't gonna pick up any acting skills any time soon, and so opted to just reduce his character's part as much as possible. Jayne as Curtis is clearly the standout of the film, with his huge shit-eating grin every time he levels a pistol at someone, and having the time of his life as he looks through a peephole at whatever the child labor law-friendly version of the strip-down his character watches. Hoy's Debbie best manages to embody the kind of emotionless, remorseless child the script constantly tells us these characters are, even if it means she comes off more than a little stiff; and Freeman is (to crib a phrase from Unshaved Mouse) a fine young gentleman who does the best he can. Seriously, his character could've been cut entirely, and the movie wouldn't have suffered one little bit.
Beyond them, the only really noteworthy thing to talk about is the murders, and it's here we come to the issue dragging Bloody Birthday down the most. As with pretty much everything in the movie (and, from what I've seen and absorbed through a decade of pop culture osmosis, everything in the genre), Bloody Birthday and slashers in general are very workmanlike.
See, as I understand them, slashers are pretty much custom-built to do one thing: draw teenagers and young adults to the theaters in droves with the promise of tits and blood, and absolutely nothing else. Even the greats of the genre, for all their name recognition and success in earlier installments, couldn't avoid falling victim to the same fate as time went on. And since generally speaking blood and tits are easy to spend money on than stunning special effects, a high-quality script, or seasoned actors, they were super easy to crank out too. However, since even blood and tits can get expensive if you throw them around too much (especially tits once you've chopped them off, cause you've only got a limited time to use them before they start rotting), and since a movie made of nothing BUT blood and tits would never see the light of day in any respectable theater the average teenager or young adult is likely to frequent, a crew making a slasher would have to show some restraint, usually in the form of suturing their selling points onto a conventional story.
As mentioned, strong plots aren't the kind of thing a slasher production can really afford if they want to turn a profit, doubly so when there are hundreds of other slashers coming out the same week vying for the same audience. And for as low as the bar for quality could get with the slasher, you don't want to go too low with it - otherwise, nobody would see your movie, and you'd be stuck with a loss of profits. So, in order to make a film worth seeing without spending too much on it and still turn a profit, you approach your work in a workmanlike fashion. You set a standard of quality that's just good enough, and make sure everything hits the standard. Even if the acting is tepid and the camerawork uninteresting and the plot as generic and pointless as it can get, so long as it's not actively offensive to the senses and displays the ever important blood and tits often enough, you can get away with being just barely good enough.
To this end, Bloody Birthday only shows off its scenes involving sex and death frequently enough to keep the average teenage audience from walking out in boredom. For this is the single most important consideration when making a slasher - never aim for a standard of quality anybody above the age of twenty-five would call good (he typed, currently age 22). It doesn't matter if the kills are uncreative (hit with a shovel, hit with a baseball bat, shot, shot, shot, shot with an arrow), or if the sex scenes barely show much, or even if the story of three children going around killing people and not getting caught only exists so we can see the (not so terribly) grisly results of their actions. So long as you show off the blood and tits, and dutifully churned out a product that's just good enough, you'll turn a profit.
Oh no, you got a little lipstick on your face, oh nooooooooo...
(Course, given that Bloody Birthday's set-up sequel never manifested and its distribution company folded shortly after its limited release, the formula doesn't always guarantee success, but nothing in this world comes with perfect failure-proofing.)
The workmanlike mindset is probably what wound up killing off the slasher as a mainstream force as the internet came to prominence and fans of the genre grew up to make their own movies. How in the world do you survive making bland, standard movies when people not only have far more passion and artistic ambition than you, but get to play around in a medium with far fewer restrictions on offensive content? They still survive today, as we'll unfortunately see plenty of times before we hit #1, but they're definitely not the juggernaut force of "just good enough"s they were back in the 80s.
Discourse about the general traits and foibles of its genre aside, Bloody Birthday just isn't terribly good. I don't know if I can say bad, seeing as its failings are those brought about by its very nature, but I CAN definitely call it boring, unengaging, and tepid. Quite frankly, I'm surprised this one ever made it to theaters, and wasn't just a direct to video knockoff. There MIGHT be enough life to it in some places that I can somewhat understand how someone who's really into horror might call it great, if I tilt my head and squint really hard, but otherwise it's just not something I'd recommend taking a look at, regardless of the poster.
Body Count: An even eight this time, none of which involve terribly memorable deaths.
Franchise Potential: Hell, I'm feeling generous. Even if I didn't like the movie, I can still see some potential for a sequel to work if you got the same kids back and filmed it something like five years later. Maybe dive head-first into the weirdo astrology junk they toss about. They might not have put their heart and soul into it, but I'd be willing to let the people who made this try again, if only to let them have a steady paycheck for a little while longer.
Well, a slow weekend put this review out much quicker, so we'll see how long it takes me to get on over to film #996, Venus in Furs. See you then!
Above: A better birthday themed horror movie than Bloody Birthday.
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