|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Science-Fiction |
|
|
| Horror |
|
|
| Fantasy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME
Rating: 
Canada. 1981.
Director – J. Lee Thompson, Screenplay – Timothy Bond, Peter Jobin & John Saxton, Story – Saxton, Producers – John Dunning & Andre Link, Photography – Miklos Lente, Music – Bo Barwood & Lance Rubin, Special Effects – Bill Doane, King Hernandez, Warren Keillor & Ron Otterson, Makeup Effects – Tom Burman, Production Design – Earl Preston. Production Company – Birthday Film Co/Famous Players.
Cast:
Melissa Sue Anderson (Virginia Wainwright), Glenn Ford (Dr Faraday), Lawrence Dane (Hal Wainwright), Sharon Acker (Estelle), Frances Hyland (Mrs Patterson), Tracy Bregman (Ann Patterson), Jack Blum (Alfred), Matt Craven (Steve), Lenore Zann (Maggie), David Eisner (Rudi), Lisa Langlois (Amelia), Michele Rene Labelle (Etienne)
Plot: Virginia Wainwright returns to school at the Crawford Academy after an accident that damaged her brain and has left her remembering little of her recent past. She is welcomed into the vicious social clique known as The Top Ten. Someone then starts killing off the members of the Top Ten. As Virginia’s eighteenth birthday approaches, she comes to believe that the killer’s identity may have a link with her own shadowy past, indeed that she herself may even be the killer during one of her blackouts.
Happy Birthday to Me was another entry in the early 1980s cycle of slasher films that began with Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). Like many of the copycat slasher films, it features a holiday date-themed title. Happy Birthday to Me holds some promise over the others in that it had a respectable director at the helm – none other than J. Lee Thompson, who had made films such as Cape Fear (1962), McKenna’s Gold (1968) and various other films (see below). Cape Fear, in particular, is a masterful film noir psychological thriller. The prowess that J. Lee Thompson displayed there is something that should set any slasher film light-years ahead of the competition.
Alas by the 1980s, J. Lee Thompson’s career was well on the way downwards – ahead for him would be the astonishingly bad remake of King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and a slew of awful Charles Bronson vehicles. Despite J. Lee Thompson, Happy Birthday to Me has little going for it beyond the usual tedium of the slasher film. The film was advertised with the marketing campaign “six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see”. While Happy Birthday to Me never takes any award for on-screen originality in this department, it does serve a mildly novel series of deaths by shish kebab, of someone being crushed by weights during a bench press and one character getting their scarf wound into a motorcycle chain. However, the level of the film never rises above this. A nauseating scene of a surgeon cutting into a brain is repeated several times over in prodigious detail. It is hard to believe such a crudely pitched film could come from the same person who directed Cape Fear. The plot arrives at a series of twists that are contrived to the point of ludicrousness.
J. Lee Thompson’s other films of genre interest are:– the classic revenge psycho-thriller Cape Fear (1962), the occult film Eye of the Devil (1967), the Communist China spy thriller The Chairman/The Most Dangerous Man in the World (1969), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975), the Western The White Buffalo (1977) with Charles Bronson hunting a mythic buffalo, 10 to Midnight (1983) with Charles Bronson vs a serial killer and the utterly dire adventure film King Solomon’s Mines (1985). J. Lee Thompson also co-wrote the scripts for the very strange psycho-thriller East of Piccadilly (1940) and the bizarre time travel/adventure film Future Hunters (1986).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
|