Happy Birthday To Me (1981)

Reviewed By: Billy

As…well…none of you know, my birthday is coming up very, very soon. I say “none” because I doubt even my brother and blog-partner JM has any idea that it’s almost my birthday. You see, JM never gives me presents, although I have gifted him with some of the finest wares he’s ever received, including a Bon Jovi poster for his birthday in ’88 and a Vinnie Vincent Invasion cassette tape that I know he still counts among his favorite birthday presents ever. Anyway, if you think JM is a bad brother who doesn’t deserve to be related to me, please comment below and let him know.

On to the movie…I thought it only appropriate that I break out my new copy of Happy Birthday To Me, the 1981 slasher classic starring Melissa Sue Anderson of “Little House on the Prairie” fame and featuring one of the all-time great movie posters in the history of horror. Thankfully, someone recently wised up, and Anchor Bay re-released the DVD with the original poster as the cover art, rather than the generic image that had previously served as the DVD cover. I mean, come on…what were they thinking the first time around.

Anyway, the plot revolves around a group of students called the Crawford Top 10 – supposedly the ten most popular and elite students at Crawford Academy. And let me just say this – if these ten a-holes are the most popular and elite, JM and I went to the wrong school. Seriously, look at these kids – there’s more frizzy hair here than at a Fleetwood Mac concert. Hell, JM and I would’ve easily been the coolest kids at this school…even if one of us was repeatedly playing a Vinnie Vincent Invasion cassette tape.

Anyway, the Crawford Top 10 don’t appear to actually do anything but sit around at a local pub drinking and race their cars over a drawbridge. Melissa Sue is Ginny, the new girl and the “Laurie Strode” of the movie…in other words, she’s way nicer than the other brats in the group and she’s forced to wear horrible asexual outfits like this one:

We also soon find out that Ginny was the victim in some horrible accident years ago, which destroyed part of her brain and killed her mother. In some wonderful flashbacks – during which a bald and bandaged Melissa Sue gyrates on a bed – we also learn that she was part of an experimental treatment in which an electromagnetic field was used to regenerate her own brain. In the shoddy explanation we’re given, Ginny’s brain is likened to a salamander’s tail, which re-grows if it’s been cut off. Personally, I’d be nervous if my brain was being compared to a salamander’s tail…but Ginny seems pretty OK with the whole thing. She does, however, start randomly eating flies and darting up trees…OK, I made that part up.

Anyway, the Crawford Top 10 soon becomes the Top 9…8…7…and so on, as someone butchers off the little shits one by one. The first to go is Lesleh Donaldson, who we at Tower Farm are quite fond of after her appearances in Funeral Home and especially Curtains, in which a murderer wearing ice skates manages to catch up to her and kill her with a scythe! Clearly, Lesleh is not much of a fighter, which is probably why she’s so easily chased down here. Next up, some Eurotrashy character who I never quite figured out gets his head stuck next to a motorcycle wheel which, when revved up, looks pretty painful. The original poster promised “six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see” – and as long as you remember that this movie came many years before Final Destination 3 had people’s heads exploding in weight machines, I’d agree that they’re pretty creative.

Speaking of weight machines, the next murder involved the ultra-painful idea of a weight being dropped onto a guy’s crotch, something that is closely followed by another nasty flashback where we actually see Melissa Sue’s brain swelling up through her skull. Gross. Melissa, by the way, starts acting kind of nutty, having all kinds of screaming fits in her doctor’s office, and finally we actually see her start killing people. First she stabs a dorky guy (who I’m convinced is Jamie Kennedy) in the stomach with a shovel, and then stabs a dorky guy (who I’m convinced could never be popular in any school in the world) in the mouth with a shish-ka-bob.

Is Melissa Sue Anderson really the final girl AND the killer? Or…like Straight-Jacket demonstrated back in the 1960s, is it possible that someone’s wearing a rubber mask that looks just like the heroine to frame her?

Oh…I think we know the answer.

But, let’s just play along for a moment. Melissa Sue finally remembers the tragic accident that killed her mother and destroyed her brain, and it involves a birthday party long ago and the slutty, drunk mother (who is sort of a Sharon-Stone-Basic-Instinct-2 prototype) having an affair with the father of another one of the Crawford Top 10 girls. Uh-oh…I see where this is going. I have a bad feeling we’re going to end up at a “birthday party” filled with dead bodies and a girl in a rubber mask.

So, yeah, in one of the most far-fetched twists in slasher history, the killer is the girl whose dad was having an affair with Melissa Sue’s mother, and she was passing herself off as Melissa Sue the whole time. And…they’re sisters! Oh, good God. This is like the worst “Scooby Doo” episode in history. Blah blah blah…there’s a struggle, the killer dies, Melissa gets blamed for the whole thing, and we’re finally done.

So…how to rate this Birthday party? Well, there’s a lot to like here. I love Melissa Sue Anderson, who should’ve made more movies like this. I also love the death sequences. And I really love the end-credits theme song, which features totally bizarre lyrics that rehash the story of the movie and are performed by Motown songstress Syreeta, who was married for a time to Stevie Wonder and had originally been tapped to replace Diana Ross in the Supremes. That this movie has a six-degrees connection to Diana Ross (who is my lifelong obsessions) once again proves that I create the world.

Unfortunately, the running time of this movie is dangerously close to two hours…which, let’s face it, is 40 minutes too long. A lot could have been cut…a WHOLE lot. So I can’t give it a perfect score. But I am glad I own it, especially given that I paid five bucks for it at Wal-Mart, and it has the good cover. Of course, it would have meant a lot more had my brother bought it for me…but, again, that would actually require him to remember that I have a birthday. F*&% you, JM…F%$% YOU!!!!

THREE-AND-A-HALF FINGERS