Tonight I took a plunge into a film that's been on my watch list for decades now and paired it with some delicious blood-red and hearty penne puttanesca for a very satisfying combination. Dinner and a horror movie nights are one of my favorites, and pasta puttanesca (which crudely translates as "whore's pasta") seems appropriate for a film dripping with sexual secrets and violence.
In the rush of slashers to come out in '81, the downright oddball Happy Birthday to Me stands out as one of the weirdest. And weird can be a very, very good thing. The film had a lot going in its favor out of the gate: directed by the legendary J. Lee Thompson (Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear, and a host of other classics), starring Melissa Sue Anderson of Little House on the Prairie fame in her first leading film role and acclaimed actor Glenn Ford, bloodied up by award-winning special effects/makeup artist Tom Burman. What could go wrong?
Well... nothing really goes wrong, but completely rewriting the ending in mid-production didn't do the movie any favors, either. More on that later.
What could have been another by-the-numbers slasher becomes something downright gonzo (in the best of ways) in Thompson's hands. The bare-bones of the story involve a group of ultra-rich kids at exclusive prep school Crawford Academy who begin disappearing one by one while Virginia (Anderson) tries to reinsert herself in the social milieu after recovering from a mysterious accident on her birthday years before that left her with no memory of what happened. Without spoiling anything, the details of the accident slowly come to light as Virginia's memory slowly returns in fragmented pieces as the film progresses and the clock ticks towards her upcoming eighteenth birthday. Giving the central character a decidedly unreliable memory and an inability to separate trauma reactions from reality keeps the narrative off-kilter, bringing a surreal tone to a film that's absolutely swimming with red herrings, grotesque practical jokes... and blood.
Thompson goes whole-hog into the gore and creative deaths here. In fact, the deaths by shish kabob, weight bench, and the famous scarf-in-a-spinning-dirtbike wheel were used prominently in the trailer and tv spot back in '81. I clearly remember the tv spots when I was in 8th grade and the movie lived in a kind of limbo for movie commercials that scared the crap out of me as a kid that I'd never gotten around to seeing. But besides painting the walls red (literally in one scene involving a fireplace poker), Thompson takes the time to develop the characters in more detail that the average slasher and creates some truly disturbing scenes of surgical and psychological trauma.
And like several other slashers of the time, the tensions between the haves and have-nots make up the political economy of the film. As off-the-wall as the film can be at times, it's ultimately the class distinctions that underpin both the backstory to Virginia's accident and the motive for the murders. The Top Ten (the elites at the school who make up the victim pool) seem to be majoring in macabre practical jokes and setting themselves violently apart from the working class members of the community. Their rabid obsession with class boundary-maintenance points to the vast emptiness of their lives and speaks to a generational class divide that haunts the town. The fact that the one place where the wealthy and working class rub elbows with each other is a pub at an inn called The Silent Woman speaks volumes about the gothic secrets of sex and violence in this town. But Thompson spends considerable time developing these characters rather than just serving up the usual annoying rich jerks lined up for the slaughter.
I'm keeping this as spoiler-free as possible because this is a terrific example of a movie to go into as coldly as possible, but a word about the ending. The original screenplay delved wildly into the supernatural for its conclusion (something that is hinted at throughout the film). But mid-filming, the paranormal was scrapped in favor of a "realistic" killer which is still no less bonkers as the film goes cheerfully off the rails during the wild, grand guignol conclusion. It's a bit of a stretch in credulity (well, more than a bit), but it works in its own gleefully illogical way. Let's just call it a birthday party to remember.
Overshadowed by the bigger slashers of the 80s, Happy Birthday to Me holds up far, far, better than most and is deserving of a watch. So get the water on for the pasta, pour yourself a nice Chianti or Barbera, and settle in for a wonderfully weird, smart, and downright nasty horror movie.
