Bloody Birthday

Bloody Birthday is a movie where its premise is both its greatest asset, and its worst liability. The premise: 3 kids are born almost simultaneously during a rare planetary alignment and a solar eclipse. Something something astrology, presto, you have a trio of 10 year olds who gleefully enjoy murder. The movie is smart enough to know how dumb this is (yes, I said that). It never asks you to believe the kids can overwhelm their victims with brute strength. Does it presume these kids are way smarter than they should be? Yes, but that only plays into how much this movie revels in the absurdity of the premise. The kids are whip-smart, the adults are one step up the intelligence ladder from broccoli, and the movie plays this up with gusto. I enjoy the movie’s willingness to go with the flow and be silly without being campy or self-aware. It’s just trashy enough to be fun. And a lot of credit goes to two out of the three evil kids; Elizabeth Hoy (Debbie) and Billy Jayne (Curtis) are delightfully evil, the kind of no-shackles, mustache-twirling lunatics that are a joy as adults, so as kids, they’re even more fun.  Unfortunately, the third of the trip is given little to do but be a third wheel, but the other two are 100% manic joy. But slasher movies have tropes. Even Scream follows the tropes it loves to call out. This is way before the slasher movie scene became self-aware. This is right after Friday The 13th turned slashers from a thing into A Thing. The fans wanted the formula: lots of blood, creative kills, plenty of nudity, and a Final Girl taking down the big masked maniac. This movie will give you creative kills for sure, and it has a surprising amount of nudity for a movie centered around three kids not out of elementary school. But the kills themselves never get out of PG-13 levels of violence, and those are few and far between. Several victims are killed out of frame, and the ones that are, have so little in the way of special effects or gore, there are some you won’t be sure if they’re dead or not. Sure, it’s weird and disturbing seeing a ten year old beat someone to death with a baseball bat, but without seeing impact or the aftermath, it makes the horror of it entirely dependent on WHO is doing it and not what is being done. And while the kids are fun villains, they’re not scary in the way Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees is scary. And that leads to the movie’s bigger problem: that final showdown. The conclusion everybody wants is a gory confrontation where the killer is vanquished in a sufficiently grotesque manner. But you can’t cut off a kid’s head or stab them a dozen times. Even if this movie weren’t presented as silly as it is, nobody is going to accept the Final Girl ramming a fireplace poker through a fifth grader’s skull. So the movie‘s final showdown ends with a very dull whimper. For all the carnage caused, it is wholly unsatisfying. So, all in all, it’s a fine movie, I guess. It definitely stands out from the Halloweens and Final Exams and whatnot of the era, just by virtue of its killers. For both good and bad reasons.