Happy Birthday to Me (1981) Directed by J. Lee Thompson
J. Lee Thompson’s Canadian ersatz giallo is perhaps the most individualistic of all the archetypal collective of eighties slashers. And its commendable uniqueness gives it a certain prestige that contrasts with the mechanical, cookie-cutter structure of the genre to which it belongs. It’s smart and bold, but its ambitious dynamic errs on the side of overconfidence, rendering its shortcomings and virtues easily distinguishable in its labyrinthine storytelling framework; Happy Birthday to Me has a major flaw, and it’s a structural one. Nevertheless, with acknowledged stumbles, J. Lee Thompson’s psychotic film never ceases to be thrilling before the eyes of its befuddled audience.
Virginia (played by Melissa Sue Anderson in her first major film role), is a beautiful, fresh-faced, wildly unpredictable young girl who is a student at the fancy Crawford Academy. She is a member of the school’s popular “top 10,” a socialite circle of wealthy teens who spend their after-school time at the Silent Woman tavern. But it seems that the privilege of this well-heeled society is only material, not life, because a mysterious leather-gloved killer is mercilessly assassinating them one by one for a cryptic, lurid motive. As can be seen, the mimetic scheme is that of a humdrum modern horror movie. But this only happens on a superficial scale, the literary astuteness of the Agatha Christie-esque screenplay delves deeper into the whodunit mystery rather than getting bogged down in the exploitative drudgery of a slasher.
The plot throws in a long list of suspects, among them an unanticipated Glenn Ford playing Virginia’s psychiatrist, and as the macabre events unravel, the film transitions from a formless style to a shape-shifting jigsaw puzzle. J. Lee Thompson’s taut directorial craft is contrived, but very rewarding to behold, this paradoxical feeling is so because the film has the gall to feature so many plot twists that you can’t even count them. It is the thrill of unpredictability. We are fooled not cleverly, but strategically by a crew of filmmakers willing to devise something more than a rehashing of the genre’s clichés. The delirium incarnated by Melissa Sue Anderson’s mesmerizing performance propagates throughout the cluttered mise-en-scène – every time you think you’ve guessed who the killer is, the film rebelliously contradicts you – we too have been transfixed by this perpetual delirium. Happy Birthday to Me could have been more, but its creative drives are wasted in a very unsystematic narrative structure that strips away the artfulness of its distinctive material. The plot twists are startling and ferocious, but it’s pretty clear to me that they’re not positioned in the right spot; they simply occur for dramatic convenience rather than essential development.
Although it is frustrating to acknowledge that this film could have been one of the most inventive horror flicks of the 80’s if only it had more narratological acumen, J. Lee Thompson’s helming and Anderson’s rock-solid central performance are so fully committed to this twisty, sordid material that you succumb to its specious charm. The killings may not be what its tagline advertises them to be, but its content does deliver on the extraordinary.