BLOODY BIRTHDAY DVD Review

Managing Editor; Dallas, Texas, US (@peteramartin)
BLOODY BIRTHDAY DVD Review


Emerging in April 1981, two and a half years after Halloween and less than one year after Friday the 13th jump-started the slasher movie craze in earnest, Bloody Birthday faced stiff competition in theaters, with Eyes of a Stranger, The Funhouse, The Burning, Final Exam, Just Before Dawn, Happy Birthday to Me, and sequels Friday the 13th Part 2 and Halloween II all staking claims to young audiences that year.

Yes, it was a glorious time to be a horror fan!

Bloody Birthday borrows its ingredients liberally from the hastily-developed slasher movie cookbook, but it owes its inspiration just as much to Village of the Damned and any number of other "killer kid" flicks. It's a movie that takes full advantage of the freedoms of the time, as far as nudity and violence are concerned, while not being concerned one whit about social responsibility.

The setting is Meadowvale, a small town in California, that appears to be a lovely, respectable community. It's the kind of place where Mel Ferrer is a doctor who races to the hospital to deliver three babies during an eclipse in 1970. Ten years later, a boy and a girl are fooling around in a graveyard. As they kiss, and the boy lovingly strokes and begins to undress the girl, little do they realize that someone is watching them. When the boy romantically invites the girl to enjoy a little privacy in an open grave -- don't ask -- they learn that couples making love in the opening sequence of a slasher movie never live long.

Joyce (Lori Lethin) and her younger brother Timmy (K.C. Martel) are then introduced. Immediately we suspect that Joyce will be "final girl" because she looks wholesome and dresses conservatively. (Also, she's top-billed.) She earns extra credit as an assistant at an elementary school in a class taught by Miss Davis (Susan Strasberg). Three youngsters in the class stand out: Debbie (Elizabeth Hoy, superbly wicked), a blonde angel with pigtails, who looks to be a model student; Curtis (the great Billy Jacoby), a bespectacled boy; and Steven (Andy Freeman), a blonde devil. They are the children who were born during the eclipse, and their birthday is approaching.

Debbie charges the two boys admission to watch her older sister Beverly undress, through a peephole in the closet. Beverly is played by Julie Brown, who would go on to become an MTV host. I vaguely remember her as an annoying screen personality, but she definitely had a banging body. She dances around her room with abandon and strips completely naked, pretty much fulfilling the "gratuitous nudity" requirement of the sub-genre all on her own, though other breasts are uncovered along the way. Sufficiently astute to charge the boys extra before Beverly takes off her panties, Debbie is clearly the leader of the gang. Perhaps she inherited her leadership skills from her father, Sheriff Brody (Bert Kramer). In any event, Sheriff Brody meets an untimely end in a way that caught me completely by surprise.

Publicly grieving, the birthday-sharing children are secretly plotting evil things, putting Timmy's life in mortal danger, and leading the movie in a truly deranged direction. It doesn't quite get there; it's a bit too uneven, and the silliness quotient tends to overwhelm the fear factor. Still, the casual evil of the children is depicted in such bright, cheerful surroundings that it's unnerving. We know they're the culprits, so their apparent innocence plays out nicely as everyone except Joyce and Timmy remain blind to their nefarious intent.

The actors who are playing the children are themselves so young that it adds to the uneasy feeling. It's like they're playing dress-up serial killers. The supporting cast includes Joe Penny as a crush-worthy teacher, Michael Dudikoff as Beverly's boyfriend, and Melinda Cordell as Mother Brody.

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