RETRO REVIEW: BLOODY BIRTHDAY (1981)
In ED HUNT’S BLOODY BIRTHDAY, three pre-pubescent killers, all born on the same day, kick off a murder spree in their small town.
I might as well put the tiger on the table. The pretext for this movie review is all subtext, for you see, as I write this, it is the evening before my birthday. Don’t bother to ask how old I am going to be, because really, what does it matter after you turn 21? Birthdays after a certain age take on a certain “meh” quality, as you just realize another year has gone by and you are literally just ticking down the days to your eventual demise. Yeah, I’m morose. I’m a horror writer, what do you expect?
Let’s be honest, nothing beat the birthdays you had as a kid. As a child of the 80’s, I still remember the fun birthdays I had, my house festooned with balloons and streamers, my school friends surrounding me in party hats, my mom bringing out a big cake that I laced with ant poison. Okay, so maybe not that last part, but in the 1981 slasher film, BLOODY BIRTHDAY, a birthday party for three pre-teen killers born under the same solar eclipse turns into a slice-and-dice free-for-all, where no adult or kid is spared.
Curtis (BILLY JAYNE), Debbie (ELIZABETH HOY), and Steven (ANDREW FREEMAN) as the three murderous birthday tikes.
PLOT:
Three kids (Debbie, Curtis, and Steven) are simultaneously born in the same hospital at the peak of a full solar eclipse. Ten years later, these seemingly adorable youngsters suddenly begin a killing spree in their town, complete with strangling’s, shootings, and stabbings galore. As their joint birthday looms on the horizon, can the adults of the town stop these tiny terrors before their party becomes a bloody birthday?
No adult is spared from the tiny tots rampage in BLOODY BIRTHDAY.
KILLS:
Let’s get this out of the way now. Though the kills in this film are not particularly gruesome when stacked against many of the 80’s slasher films that came out around this time, make no mistake that they are DISTURBING. And really, that all has to do with the fact that these are 10-year-old kids killing adults. Tiny, angel-faced, little kids committing cold-blooded murder. I cannot convey how unsettling it feels to watch a cherubic-faced boy gun down his teacher in broad daylight, all the while smiling gleefully. Like they say, they don’t (and can’t) make ‘em like this anymore.
It all pops off about a week before Debbie (ELIZABETH HOY), Steven (ANDREW FREEMAN) and Curtis’ (BILLY JAYNE) birthdays, who are all turning 10 and were all coincidentally born on the same day as a rare solar eclipse was occurring. Whether they had these murderous predilections before is never answered, as apparently they only started killing right before they are set to each turn the big 1-0. One night, a teen couple is making out in a cemetery (because, hey where else in the 80’s are you going to make out)? In any case, things get hot and heavy, and they decide to take their amorous activities to an open grave. That’s right, AN OPEN GRAVE, because there’s nothing like a freshly dug hole awaiting a dead body to get a girl wet amiright? Okay, maybe if she wears all black and listens to Sisters of Mercy (*looks around nervously*). The randy teens are suddenly ambushed by unknown attackers, the guy taking a shovel to the face and the girl getting strangled by a jump rope as she’s semi-hosted out of the grave. Before the killer or killers leave, they inadvertently drop one of the handles of the jump rope into the grave before they bury the teens in it.
From there, the film falls into a mish-mash of HALLOWEEN meets THE BAD SEED, as these pint-sized killers proceed to wreak havoc in their town, cutting down adults with all the savageness and cunning of a bunch of tiny Hannibal Lecter’s. Acting as their own little whippersnapper hit squad, the three tots methodically take out any adult or kid that stands in their way. Even Debbie’s father, who is the sheriff, gets taken out by them in broad daylight in his front yard, beaten to death with a baseball bat as the mom washes dishes just a few feet away in the house. A teacher who declines a request from the troubled trio for no homework the week of their birthday gets gunned down and thrown into a closet by a smiling Curtis. Speaking of Curtis, we quickly grasp that he is the Patrick Bateman of the group, taking particular enjoyment out of the act of killing. In maybe one of the most chilling kills of the movie, Curtis stumbles across another teen couple having sex in the back of a van (for a movie centered around three 4th-graders there is a LOT of heavy nudity in this movie, just sayin’). Being the twisted little pervert he is, he spies on them, and when the couple hear a noise and open up the back door, they are both promptly gunned down by Curtis, grinning like a mini Arthur Dent the whole time. You just know Curtis was killing cats in the neighborhood before graduating to adults.
The kids are not alright in ED HUNT’S BLOODY BIRTHDAY.
VISUALS/SFX:
If you are looking for a slasher splatter-fest, be prepared to be disappointed, as there is very little blood and gore to be found, with the exception of the fabulous JULIE BROWN, who plays Debbie’s sister Beverly, taking an arrow through the eye. But, despite the lack of viscera, there are still plenty of kills packed into the tight 85-minute run time. The visuals and effects are pretty banal, but what this film does do well is to build the tension around who these kids are going to kill next, as well as how they are finally going to get caught. While I won’t give the ending away, I will say that the end leaves it open to a sequel, which sadly never came to fruition.
BILLY JAYNE as the gun-happy Curtis.
PERFORMANCES:
As BLOODY BIRTHDAY’s whole premise surrounds these three evil kids, it is really their performances that make this film a worthwhile watch, particularly ELIZABETH HOY as Debbie and BILLY JAYNE as Curtis.
ELIZABETH HOY’S Debbie is a cunning, manipulative sociopath, a creature of pure survival instinct and personal gain, hidden under the guise of an angelic, golden-haired little girl. Of the three killers, she is the one that always seems to be a few steps ahead of everyone else. When they kill her sherriff father on the front lawn of her house, she smiles as she watches Steven beating him to death with a baseball bat, but when she suddenly sees a boy from school come upon the aftermath, she quickly goes into cover-up mode, shouting to her mom that dad fell on the steps. In another scene, Debbie takes Steven and Curtis to her bedroom closet and charges them each a quarter to spy on her sister Beverly, dancing nude in her room, through a peephole. Like I said earlier, they just don’t make movies like this anymore.
BILLY JAYNE as Curtis brings the psychopathic energy to the killer trio, relishing his kills with the gleeful exuberance of a kid on his first trip to Disneyland. When the kids realize that their neighbor and sometimes babysitter Joyce (LORI LETHIN) is on to them for all the deaths in the neighborhood, Curtis comes in with a plan to discredit her in the eyes of the town adults. At the kids joint birthday party, the whole town shows up to celebrate these three pre-pubescent sickos, and Curtis decides to make Joyce think he’s laced the birthday cakes with ant poison. When she runs out and starts yelling at people to stop eating because Curtis poisoned the cake, knocking it out of their hands, he puts his finger into the icing and eats it in front of everyone, proving that he actually didn’t poison the cake at all. But what he did do was to make Joyce look crazy in front of the rest of the town, which was his plan all along. BILLY JAYNE’S performance is downright chilling, creating a child killer who’s pathology is far more savage than serial killers more than twice his age.
LORI LETHIN as Joyce and K.C. MARTEL as Timmy in BLOODY BIRTHDAY.
OVERALL IMPRESSIONS:
We never find out why the kids suddenly start killing, and their motives are explained away by a bunch of astrological mumbo jumbo. Early on in the film we find out that Joyce (LORI LETHIN) does astrological charts, and when she does one for Debbie, she finds a strange anomaly. Apparently, because of the solar eclipse that Debbie, Steven, and Curtis were born under, it means that the sun and the moon were both blocking Saturn, which means that there is something missing from Debbie’s personality. It’s a flimsy rationale to explain away these kids' homicidal behavior. It’s not their fault, they were all born under that eclipse. It's a less scary and disturbing scenario for the adults of the film to justify why these kids did what they did. Because the obvious explanation is even more terrifying and appalling. That they did it purely because they enjoyed it. The kids even kept a scrapbook of their kills for crying out loud.
Though not the best slasher film, BLOODY BIRTHDAY is an enjoyable watch because it is so shocking. When you have little kids strangling, shooting, and beating people to death, it’s unnerving to watch, particularly because the kids take so much enjoyment out of it. Part of what makes 80’s slasher films like this so enjoyable to watch (at least for me) is that they push the boundaries of taboo subject matter and elements, getting away with stuff that would be unthinkable nowadays. Let’s face it, they don’t make birthdays or slasher films like this anymore.
BILLY JAYNE as Curtis and ANDREW FREEMAN as Steven in BLOODY BIRTHDAY.
THE GORY DETAILS:
An early title for the movie was HAPPY BIRTHDAY, but the title was changed to avoid confusion with the 1980 slasher movie HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (1981) which was released some months earlier.
Director/writer ED HUNT came up with the angle of the children being evil because of their birth during an eclipse after reading an article about astrology. The article claimed that astrology influenced the deaths of presidents sitting in office every 20 years; which the character of Joyce mentions later in the film.
Star LORI LETHIN said that the mood during shooting BLOODY BIRTHDAY was actually quite light hearted, despite the film's disturbing content. Her young co-stars were often laughing between takes during production.
MY RATING: 6.5/10
WHERE TO WATCH:
Tubi, Amazon Prime, Sling TV, Google Play, and YouTube.
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