Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
Columbia Tri-Star DVD (region 1)
d. J Lee Thompson; scr. John CW Saxton, Peter Jobin, Timothy Bond; pr. John Dunning, Andre Link; ph. Michael A. Jones, Miklos Lente; m. Bo Harwood, Lance Rubin; ed. Debra Karen; cast. Melissa Sue Anderson, Glenn Ford, Lawrence Dane, Sharon Acker, Francis Hyland (110 mins)
In the early 1980s a new form of horror movie began to boom – the slasher film.
A wholly disreputable trend, the slasher film emerged primarily in the wake of the hit Halloween and such minor but worthy efforts as Black Christmas. Later encompassing such diverse works as Friday the 13th, The Burning and Hell Night, the genre proliferated in the early 1980s where it attracted a diversity of talent behind the scenes.
Mostly with youthful casts, these films all featured a succession of grisly deaths committed by a mysterious killer bent on systematically eliminating a group of usually teenagers. The films were cheap affairs hinging on the gimmick of mass murder vividly realized and were usually made by aspiring young filmmakers looking to build a resume of work. The Canadian film Happy Birthday to Me was something different: a high profile and glossy murder mystery cum slasher film directed by a longtime veteran of the movies – international auteur J. Lee Thompson. It was here that Thompson revealed a contempt for humanity that bordered on the misanthropic and the film is in retrospect seen as an offbeat attempt at an up-market slasher film which served more as an indication of the move to cynicism which would affect the remainder of Thompson’s career in the 1980s when he teamed with actor Charles Bronson for a series of bleak thrillers. Happy Birthday to Me nevertheless does have a minor cult following.
In Happy Birthday to Me, Melissa Sue Anderson stars as a troubled teenager. She is a member of the school’s “top ten” and although enamored of this group of high school seniors is not as fond of their pranks as others. A young student is walking along the street and gets in her car whereupon she is attacked by a black-gloved killer.
Meanwhile the other students are at a local pub and get involved in a skirmish with the older locals. Cast out, they play a game of chicken on a raised bridge, a game which terrifies Anderson who then runs home. Her father is concerned for her, especially as she has suffered a traumatic experience related to the recent death of her mother. At her home, she is watched from outside as she disrobes and has a shower. The next day at school, the students are disciplined for their behavior at the Inn. In science class, the lesson triggers a psychological reaction from Anderson who goes to see her doctor (Glenn Ford) who explains her problem is in the loss of memory after a near-death experience which saw her saved by new, experimental surgical procedures. She gradually begins to remember the surgery. Soon however, more of her fellow classmates are disappearing and it seems that someone from within their midst is murdering them. Police turn up to search the school just as Anderson gets increasingly distraught flashbacks about the death of her mother and an additional traumatic memory.
For its station, Happy Birthday to Me is quite an ambitious venture, combining the novelty succession of deaths with a well-sustained murder mystery leading to an out-of-the-blue twist ending. Although a polished film and directed with an eye for suspense, the film remains a dire look at teenage friendship dissolving from within.
Thompson has an eye for the needed arrogance and camaraderie of youth and a feel for the internal tensions which threaten to destroy the surface unity. The youths are reckless, borderline criminal in their sense of fun and pranksterism and there is an undertone of rising sexual perversion affecting the film’s sense of characterization. Their care-free enthusiasm is held in contrast to Anderson, whose past trauma puts her in an additional reactionary position regarding the Patriarchal authority around her. Thus, she is affected by two strong Patriarchs, her father and her doctor, both of whom express paternalistic benevolence for her well-being. Although this qualifies as a minor generational allusion to authority and youthful responsibility, it never really gels and merely seems a contextualizing factor. Indeed, the sense of Patriarchal captivity affecting Anderson suggests that her trauma is that of a young woman learning to adapt to the law of the father in the absence of a mother figure. Although this saturates the movie’s buildup, it is effectively negated by the final surprise revelations.
Happy Birthday to Me is a film the emotional payoff of which depends upon its trick ending. This ending was arrived at after some deliberation and is such a last-minute creation as to not only be unpredictable but to take the film into the realm of the truly grotesquely absurd horror melodrama.
Its several twists and convolutions suggest a certain hyperbolic structure to the movie where the concern for individual trauma in a patriarchal context becomes an hysterical but still effective exercise in gory theatrics. This intersection of horror and melodrama works well but negates much of the psychological buildup the film previously offered. Indeed, as every youth is shown to be a potential murder suspect and main suspicion naturally centers on Anderson, the film’s revelation of her involvement and her trauma is treated as a puzzle on psychological grounds but is ultimately a red herring. By negating the little psychological complexity in the film’s buildup, Happy Birthday to Me finally emerges as nothing more than a slick exercise in self-conscious slasher film manipulation. It may demonstrate the director’s technical mastery of the form but is purely an empty and slick exercise in horror theatrics for their own sake – the slasher film as self-conscious narrative game. However, for a while it serves as an engrossing look at the disturbing inter-relationship between memory and violent psychotic behavior. Resolutely well constructed, Happy Birthday to Me exists merely for its cynical, polished manipulation: a film-maker’s slasher movie.
Vision
A TRIBUTE TO GLENN FORD
(music by Enya)
The visual transfer is a fine anamorphic widescreen preserving the film’s original screen ratio. There is a concern for smallish town atmosphere and good use is made of a raising bridge in several sequences leading up to the final flashback of source of the heroine’s sad trauma. The black-gloved killer with a straight razor is, of course, a slick allusion to the Italian “giallo” thrillers of Dario Argento and suchlike although the film lacks Argento’s many stylistic flourishes. Sly, prowling camera movements feature and the use of point of view suggests the needed threat, menace and malevolence of intrusive gazes. As Anderson disrobes, there is a slight sexualization of young women and the point of view menace becomes a kind of sexual sadism. Set design is vivid and there is polished detail to the location work. The use of tilted angles and colored lights is nicely used to suggest the return of memory and such scenes benefit from smooth and fluid transitions: such fine fluidity is often contrasted to more abruptly shocking cuts and moments. The film’s grotesque ending is perhaps less gory in this transfer than originally intended as the source print has the cuts the MPAA insisted upon for the film to get an R rating. There are no deleted scenes or restoration effects to indicate just how gory the ending was in its original conception. Nice use is made of a sports motif to tie into the film’s theme of narrative gamesmanship.
Sound
The sound transfer is available in a remastered Dolby Digital mono only. It is effective and deep enough, capturing the film’s studied realism as it segues into hysterical melodrama by the film’s end. The DVD release of this film from Columbia Tri-Star proved a sore point for fans of the movie and it proved a talking point on internet message boards. The transfer was taken from a pre-release print of the movie and thus differs slightly from the theatrical version which was reportedly slightly shorter and featured a different musical score. The very cheesy disco score on the DVD version was considered a major disadvantage over the original tenser score and the DVD release was thus duly criticized for not even mentioning these alterations on the disc or in promotional material. The score used is terse enough when called for but the dated minor disco breaks are distractions. The heavy ambience brings out the nuances of the coastal location and details of footsteps are always crisp as is the nocturnal ambience of crickets and birds. Indeed, there is a fully developed naturalism to the sound design here, which anchors the film in a palpable realism. As usual for Thompson, he uses longish scenes of suspense featuring these natural sounds into which the score slowly filters in. Vehicular engine noise is vibrant when called for and the sounds of distressed people about to die are also well utilized as is a radio broadcast.
Special Features
In the way of special features are trailers for contemporary horror films – I Know What You Did Last Summer; Identity and Resident Evil. These have no separate links and play thus in succession. There is nothing about the film of Happy Birthday to Me itself although included in the DVD case is an insert sheet featuring original poster art.
