Happy Birthday To Me

Happy Birthday To Me, in typically yawn-inducing slasher-movie fashion, details the bloodbath that ensues after several students begin disappearing under mysterious circumstances, with the primary suspect in the case a young woman (Melissa Sue Anderson’s Virginia Wainwright) who is still recovering from a traumatic childhood event. At a running time of close to two hours, Happy Birthday To Me suffers from an almost extraordinarily tedious atmosphere that holds the viewer at arms length from start to finish – with the film’s many problems compounded by an incongruously deliberate pace (ie there is absolutely no reason that a movie of this sort should move this slowly). Screenwriters John Saxton, Peter Jobin, and Timothy Bond bog the narrative down with a whole host of needless instances of plot and backstory, and it’s clear, too, that the scripters prove utterly unable to offer up even a single compelling or interesting character. (For the most part, these people seem to have emerged directly from a template for slasher flicks.) Happy Birthday To Me‘s sole saving grace is its proliferation of admittedly decent kill sequences, as filmmaker J. Lee Thompson infuses such moments with a gleefully over-the-top gusto that proves impossible to resist – which ultimately ensures that one would be far better off watching a YouTube highlight reel rather than the movie itself.

*1/2 out of ****