Bloody Birthday (1981)

Bloody Birthday (1981) Directed by Ed Hunt

Evil child-killer genre meets slasher conventions in this twisted tale of two boys and a girl born on the same day during a solar eclipse in 1970 in a Southern California hospital. Ten years later, these three dastardly cute children turn out to be devious sadists, who murder anyone who grows suspicious of their deceptively precocious infantile appearances. Lori Lethin plays the older sister of one of the town’s normal children, and one of the first to expose the sociopathy and macabre murderous proclivities of the diabolical trio. Ed Hunt’s Bloody Birthday takes the incorruptible image of childhood at its most harmlessly physical and provocatively corrupts it.

The exploitative and gleefully frivolous portrayal of the homicidal psyche of these three ruthless kids is not the psychoanalytic treatment given to Patty McCormack’s Rhoda, nor the supernatural treatment given to Harvey Spencer’s Damien, but the straightforwardly provocative and vile treatment. The relish in the angelic faces of the persuasive killers as they commit their crimes is downright creepy, and why not fucking awesome too! But the film sacrifices one of the essentials of the simplistic slasher film methodology, and that is the suspense factor.

The plot is a dry, silly, undisguised routine that has no sense of intrigue – even the most absurd and idiotic slashers have some of this – there is no plot twist to be revealed, there is no genesis of evil – just goofy astrological mumbo-jumbo – and the killer kids are unveiled in the first act. Just picture this, a killer kids flick where you don’t know who the culprits are – one where everyone looks so utterly unbelievably adorable that it’s virtually impossible to guess – that’s the movie I wanted to watch. But Bloody Birthday preferred to indulge in farcical amounts of nudity, inane and hammy bloodless murder sequences, and an anticlimactic finale rather than exploit the strengths of a screenplay full of macabre potential.