HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

Anyone doubting the influence of giallo films on the North American slasher need look no further than HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, a 1981 Canadian shocker that takes the majority of its cues from the giallo playbook. The film is essentially a whodunit with the feel of something like THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK, a giallo with a similar narrative thrust in that it focuses mainly on one young woman whose grasp on reality is so shaky that she may or may not be responsible for bloody murder. While the comparison with that particular giallo film ends there, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME shares several giallo elements, like the black gloved killer, the heaps of red herrings, an over-complicated twist ending, and a motive built on ridiculous circumstance and shaky psychology. If you're a fan of Italian stalk and slash murder mysteries, you'll feel right at home here. 

The film follows Virginia, a young woman with some serious emotional problems after suffering brain damage in a car accident that also killed her drunk, belligerent mother. Virginia has undergone experimental brain therapy for her injuries. She has also been seeing a shrink to help her cope with her repressed memories and emotional scars. Virginia spends most of her time hanging out with a group of rich kids at her University (they're referred to collectively as “The Ten”, a not-so-subtle hint at the films potential body count). They're basically wealthy layabouts, spending all their time at a local tavern, attending sporting events and engaging in fleeting romances.

But something unfortunately nasty is about to befall The Ten. One by one, they're picked off by an unknown killer. As the disappearances mount, so does Virginia's stress level. Coupled with the slowly returning memories of the fatal car accident, it's all a bit too much for our poor Final Girl (that's not even remotely a spoiler, by the way; there's a reason she's named Virginia, after all). She begins hallucinating and losing time. Worse, she begins to think that maybe she is the one responsible for all the disappearances. Is Virginia really the killer? Maybe it's Steve, the loose cannon with the warped sense of humor? Or maybe it's Arthur, the quiet weirdo with the taxidermy hobby? Could it be Virginia's shrink, the esteemed Dr. Faraday, an older man with a slightly odd obsession with his young patient? 

Do you kids at home know?

The solution to the puzzle definitely comes out of left field, culminating in a Scooby-Doo styled ridiculous unmasking of the killer. In a way, the ending is perfect for this type of film (and to be fair, gialli are also known for their head scratching reveals). Simply put, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME doesn't make a lick of logical sense. Its a film wrapped in a cocoon of psycho-babble and pseudo-psychology, and no matter how forcefully the film states its tripe, none of it ever feels like a satisfactory explanation for the goings on in the narrative. It's also one of those films that tries to hint at its final revelation through back story exposition and flashbacks, but they're so muddled and vague that you couldn't reasonably put those pieces together without a hefty dose of hindsight. For more than half its running time, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME feels like its just making it up as it goes along, peppering in exposition here and there in a desperate attempt to have it all make sense, and when it reaches its finale, all that's left to do is go out as absurdly as possible.

But the other half of the film ditches the psycho-babble for far less serious minded slasher entertainment. Its this half of the film that works best, with enough twists and turns, semi relatable characters and spilled blood to warrant a viewing. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME was directed by J. Lee Thompson, the man responsible for such great films as CAPE FEAR (the original), THE GUNS OF NAVARONE and BEFORE WINTER COMES, and his directorial skill shines through the otherwise pedestrian material. There's a good deal of visual ingenuity on display here and Thompson keeps the movie pressing forward, even when the gooey psycho-nonsense threatens to derail it.

So what we have is a tale of two films. We have a thoroughly unconvincing psychological thriller about a woman whose guilt and trauma might have given rise to a murderous fugue state, and we have a simple and reductive slasher film about a group of kids being crushed, slashed, stabbed and otherwise manhandled by someone with serious impulse control issues. The former is undeniably the weaker affair, a statement I have to issue with a sad heart as there is far more interesting material to be mined from psychosis and guilt than there will ever be from simplistic slasher action. But damn it, the slasher action on display here is good enough for me to recommend HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, albeit with reservations that should be obvious by now. It's a decent enough time waster, but sadly, that's all it is.

THE MUTILATOR

THE MUTILATOR is a movie with two directors but zero brain cells. It began its life with the far less catchy title of FALL BREAK, only to re-titled THE MUTILATOR by its distributors. I have to wonder if that stuck in the craw of its directors. After all, they probably paid good money for the horrible Fall Break song that plays over the opening credits. The biggest failure of the film isn't that it offers up zero chills or thrills. No, its biggest failure, its most glaring and egregious flaw, is that it's boring. So very, very boring.

So what's this film all about? Well, it's about Ed Jr., or as I like to call him, Little Ed. Little Ed is estranged from his father, Big Ed (not a joke, that is how he is referred to in the film). When Little Ed was literally Little Ed, he accidentally shot his mother to death while attempting to clean his trophy hunter father's hunting rifles. This has understandably led to a bit of awkward separation between the two. So imagine Little Ed's surprise when he receives a phone call from his father asking him to head up to the family condo on the beach and close it up for the winter. Little Ed complies with his father's wishes, taking along with him a gaggle of friends. Little do they know that Big Ed is lurking around the property with a big, sharp war ax, just chomping at the bit to cut his son to ribbons.

And after 45 minutes of watching a group of lousy characters drink beer, sit on the floor and walk around the property, Big Ed finally gets down to business, drowning, pitchforking, chainsawing, and all around mutilating our cast of dullards and dip shits.

The film plays it straight, by the way. I kept expecting some last minute twist to happen, like finding out that Little Ed and Big Ed were in cahoots the whole time. That would make sense here, because although Big Ed is a certifiable lunatic that keeps a framed photo of a man he accidentally murdered via ski boat on a mantle piece (and yes, the picture is of the man's bloody corpse), Little Ed is every bit as weird as his dad. Little Ed, with a smile on his face, regales his friends with all kinds of gruesome boyhood memories, including the time he watched his dad slice open a pregnant shark, its little babies flopping all over the floor. I have to wonder, given Little Ed's behavior in the early part of the film, if that plot twist wasn't in the works from the start but dropped as revisions went along.

The acting isn't any good, but its difficult to perform well in a film that is total shit. They're barely even characters anyway, with no real sense of camaraderie or chemistry between them. I know friends often take the piss out of one another, but having Little Ed's best friend tell him “hey, if you hear anyone downstairs, don't shoot. It's just me” comes off as a bit insensitive, don't you think? The film is filled with idiotic lines like that, my favorite being when Little Ed's girlfriend wakes him up in the middle of the night. She's discovered that everyone is missing, a development she explains to Little Ed by saying “All the kids are missing”, which is odd as she's the exact same age as her missing friends. Let me just say this, when Ben Moore, world famous actor from TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! and SHE FREAK, delivers the most convincing performance in your film, you may have made a total turd.

There's also a smattering of weird comedic bits that don't work and a final act that looks like it was filmed in a bowling ball. I could barely tell what the hell was going on as Little Ed and Big Ed had their climactic tussle inside a garage, a tussle that would have had some kind of dramatic oomph to it had the film bothered to give Little Ed time to see that the guy trying to kill him was his father. Sure, the kills are gnarly and suitably gory (effects legends Mark Shostrom and Anthony Showe provided the goods here), but if I only wanted to watch people being fake killed for 90 minutes I would have just watched FACES OF DEATH. It would have been nice to have at least one character worth rooting for or at least one plot development that was interesting, but all THE MUTILATOR wanted to give me was a needlessly tasteless scene of a woman having a giant hook rammed into her vagina.

And maybe that's enough for you, Dear Reader, but not me. No, not at all. I needed something more than that. For 90 or so minutes, I was bored stiff by THE MUTILATOR.