Happy Birthday to Me (1981)

We open at night, with a slow track over the seemingly tranquil New England campus of the Crawford Academy. And as our focus shifts to one particular student, who appears to be in a hurry to get somewhere, the soundtrack turns sinister as it becomes obvious someone is following her.

Suddenly, the girl is attacked and whipped by a flurry of leather straps! However, Bernadette O’Hara’s attacker turns out to be Winston: the pet bulldog of Mrs. Patterson, the school’s headmistress, and Bernadette (Donaldson) just got tangled up in his leash. Here, as they work to untangle this mess, Patterson (Hyland) chastises her student to be more careful, and how she expects more from one of Crawford’s Top Ten.

Now, the Crawford Top Ten is an elite, and elitist, knot of prep school students. But I think this rank has less to do with academic or athletic achievement and more to do with how much money their parents put into Crawford’s coffers. And you can easily spot a Crawford Top Tenner by the long, striped scarves they wear. And you’ll be able to sort the haves from the have-nots as the bodies start piling up. (Yes, Fellow Programs. That’s a clue to motive. Sort of. But not really. Look, just stick with us on this one, okay?) And as a group, they spend way too much time at The Silent Woman, a local watering hole, whose logo is a decapitated woman. (Subtle.)

All caught up? Great!

And so, after silently taking this plot-specific tongue-lashing, once the sniffy Patterson moves on and is out of earshot, Bernadette reveals how she really feels about the old hag before moving on to the campus parking garage. But just as the girl is about to start her car, an unknown assailant attacks from the backseat!

Grabbing their victim by the throat with black-gloved hands, the unseen attacker pulls the girl into the backseat and throttles her until she stops moving. Credit to Bernadette, here, for playing possum; and as the attacker lets go, she manages to get out of the car and escapes. But then, after several suspenseful twists and turns, Bernadette runs right into somebody she knows. 

And thinking she’s finally safe, the girl visibly relaxes until this person, whom the audience never gets to see clearly except for their white tennis shoes, produces a straight razor and slits open poor Bernadette’s throat.

From there, we shift to The Silent Woman, where the local Shriners are both snockered and about to start their, oh, 45th cycle of “99-Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” One table over sits several of the Crawford Ten -- well, nine now, I guess. 

Only seven preppies are currently present but the rest start trickling in, starting with Virginia Wainwright (Anderson), their latest addition, making it almost a quorum. Then, creepy Alfred Morris (Blum) arrives, complete with psycho-loner army surplus jacket, white shoes, and black gloves, along with his pet rat, George, making that everybody except the late Bernadette.

As for the rest of the Crawford Ten we have class clown Rudy (Eisner) and his girlfriend, Maggie (Zann); Amelia (Langlois) and her boyfriend, Greg Hellman (Rebiere); compulsive gambler Steve Maxwell (Craven); Etienne Vercures (LaBelle), a motorcycle-riding exchange student from France; and last, but not least, Virginia’s best friend, Ann Thomerson (Bregman).

And while the others debate on whether or not to wait for Bernadette before ordering the next round, Rudy and Greg pick a fight with the obnoxious Shriners, which eventually leads them to secreting George the Rat into one of their beer steins. 

When all hell breaks loose over this, the bartender sides with the locals and kicks the remnants of the Top Ten out of his tavern. (More on this underage anachronism later.)

Regrouping outside, the students hear the warning horn for a nearby drawbridge, meaning it's time for another round of the Crawford Top Ten's traditional "Game" -- where they recklessly race over the opening drawbridge before it cracks opens too far to let the passing boats through.

Here, when Virginia winds up with Greg and Amelia in his Trans Am, we also notice that Alfred slinks away on his moped, wanting no part of this nonsense. 

Meanwhile, as the two sides of the double-leaf drawbridge start to rise, the first few vehicles make it up the ersatz ramp and over the widening chasm before things get too steep. Then Steve chickens out at the last moment. And then, despite Virginia's hysterical protests, Greg floors it and manages to pull off a full-Needham, flying over the gap, and manages to stick the landing without wrecking the car. (Not by the evidence we see, mind you. Wow.)

But even though they made it over in one piece, a rattled Virginia is suddenly seized by some kind of hysterical flashback involving the very same bridge. Details of this vision are a bit sketchy, but the girl completely loses it before bolting from the car. And as a distraught Virginia goes screaming into the night, Ann asks Greg what happened. When he doesn’t give her a satisfactory answer, Ann -- with a murderous conviction -- says, “I could break your neck.”

Meanwhile, as she makes her way home, a now calmer Virginia cuts through a cemetery -- a familiar route, apparently. Here, she stops at a grave that turns out to be her mother’s. Producing a pair of garden shears from … somewhere, the girl starts trimming the grass around the headstone -- all the while talking to the deceased.

Nearby, amongst the other tombstones, someone stalks toward the girl! But it’s only Etienne, who offers to walk her home. An offer that sounds more like a threat, honestly. Here, Virginia declines; but the boy clandestinely follows her home anyway, where he starts peeping through all the windows of her family home. (Suspect or pervert? Too early to tell.)

Inside, Virginia finds her dad, Hal Wainwright (Dane), waiting up for her, who wants to know if she went to the cemetery again, again. Seems dear old dad doesn’t think it’s healthy that his daughter spends so much time there communing with the dead. Here, we learn that Estelle Wainwright died some four years ago. We also find out that they’ve just recently moved back into this house, which they left right after Estelle passed away. As to why? Well, the movie isn’t quite ready to reveal that yet.

Also of note, Virginia has some emotional baggage about her mother that she still needs to work through. And when I say “some” I mean a metric shit-ton. And to help unravel this, her father has hired a psychiatrist, Dr. David Faraday (Ford), to help Virginia unlock some repressed memories -- like the one she just experienced after the bridge stunt -- and work through her trauma, so the healing process can begin, and they can all move on.

But progress on this has been very slow. In fact, things appear to have been getting worse. Much worse, despite Faraday’s assurances to the contrary. And when you combine this psychosis with her behavior in the car and graveyard, this makes Virginia a psychological powder keg and, between you and me, Fellow Programs, I think this mystery is solved already…

After John Dunning and Andre Link, co-founders of the Montreal based Cinepix Productions, gave the Canadian film industry a much needed kick-in-the-ass with the production and release of the taboo-breaking film Valerie (1969), an erotic tale where a nun leaves her convent to explore the burgeoning hippy scene, becomes a prostitute, and falls in love, they ushered in a whole new genre retroactively known as Maple Syrup Porn.

And as we talked about in our earlier review of My Bloody Valentine (1981), where you can get the full origin of Dunning, Link and Cinepix, this kind of bawdy product wasn’t exactly what the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC) had in mind when they first dangled the financial carrot of government subsidization and tax shelter clauses to help reignite the country’s stagnating film industry; and things would only get worse from there as they constantly battled over the “softcore syrup-sleaze” they were peddling.

Now, around the same time Valerie was released, Dunning and Link imported Lee Frost, Bob Cresse and Dave Friedman’s Love Camp 7 (1969) for its Canadian release, which was a two-punch combo of a Women in Prison film and a medical / sexual deviancy porn loop as the film was set in a Nazi prison camp. The plot, such as it was, concerned two American female spies, who allowed themselves to be captured to infiltrate the eponymous prison, where they will hopefully locate and liberate a Jewish scientist. A lot of nudity, bondage and whippings ensue before the daring escape and final battle. Thus and lo, the Nazisploitation film was officially codified.

Looking at the grosses the American-produced Love Camp 7 was making north of the border, Dunning decided to make his own Nazisploitation film and cash-in on both sides of the border with the luridly lured public. Conspiring with English professor by day / screenwriter by night John Saxton, Dunning drew inspiration from actual wartime atrocities and medical experiments performed on unwilling subjects by the Reich. Thus, they decided to fictionalize the life and times of Ilsa Koch, the notorious “Bitch of Buchenwald,” who reportedly excised the skin of tattooed prisoners to make her furniture. Classy, and rather tasteless.

 The Buffalo News (October 17, 1975).

“There had never been a real female villain, like Boris Karloff or Dracula, and this fascinated us. I guess the world needed one,” Dunning told the Washington Post’s Kenneth Turan (The Omaha World Herald, August 1, 1976) “[Our character] fills a gap in entertainment.” And to fill that gap for Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (1975), convinced that women were the true Aryans, Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne) would test the limits of female endurance through a series of terrible tortures to prove her theory, and then breed a race of Super Women -- after she personally “test-drives” all the breeding stock naturally.

To actually make the film, Dunning reached out to Friedman to produce it. He agreed. Friedman, of course, was the former partner of Herschell Gordon Lewis. And together, those two ushered in the era of Gorenography with Blood Feast (1963), Two-Thousand Maniacs (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965). From there, the duo split and Friedman left the gore behind with Lewis and had been producing softcore sleaze ever since with the likes of The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966), The Lustful Turk (1968) and Trader Hornee (1970).

Said Friedman (The Sleaze Merchants, 1995), “I was licensed to do business in California, had all the necessary paperwork, could do a payroll, et cetera. So they hired me to produce it here. I knew the old Hogan’s Heroes set was still standing, but it was on a property that had been sold for development and was slated for demolition. They let me use it for Ilsa because we intended to burn it down at the end of the film and that saved them the expense of doing it.”

Inspired by the likes of Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953) and John Sturges’ The Great Escape (1963), Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1971) was a TV sit-com based at a Nazi prisoner of war camp, where the Allied inmates ran covert operations from their secret tunnel HQ. The German commandant and the guards were played as utter buffoons and were thwarted at every turn. And it was funny -- if you didn’t think about it too hard, or remembered what was going on at the other camps further up the rail line.

Friedman would hire Don Edmonds to direct Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS -- who called Saxton’s script “the worst piece of shit I ever read” -- and also handled the casting of the title character. Originally, Friedman wanted Phyllis Davis, who had starred in Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), to play Ilsa but she turned it down flat, repulsed after reading the script, which led him to Plan B: Dyanne Thorne.

Having studied under Uta Hagen and Stella Adler, Thorne was an actor, showgirl, and singer, who had starred in Joe Sarno's steamy Sin in the Suburbs (1964) and played the Fairy Godmother in Corey Allen’s The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio (1972), and would squeeze in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS in between The Swinging Barmaids (1975), Wham-Bam-Thank You, Spaceman (1975), and Chesty Anderson, U.S. Navy (1976). “Ilsa is a very strong character,” Thorne told Turan. “She is the whole cake, not just the icing. Men go on her arm, not the other way around. She is a woman without love, a woman without humanity. Ilsa is anti-life."

But in real life Thorne was the exact opposite of Ilsa. She was a founding member of the Las Vegas based Religious Science International, which preached the power of positive thinking and held self-esteem workshops. Believing in an affirmative positivity, Thorne declared, “I have a love affair with life itself."

Both Dunning and Link would go uncredited as the executive producers on Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, and Friedman would have his name removed and replaced with an alias before its release, hedging their bet with an opening disclaimer that what audiences were about to see was “based upon documented fact” and how the film was dedicated to the ideal of showing us these depths of human depravity so they would never happen again. And while the subject matter was rather grisly on paper, on screen it all comes off as pure camp.

 The Buffalo News (October 22, 1975).

The film would be a hit on both sides of the border but also churned up a lot of controversy. Critics roasted it -- most notably Gene Siskel, who published the contact info of the distributor (Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1975), and Vincent Canby, who got the joke but walked out on the film anyway, declaring it “the worst softcore sex-and-violence film of the decade  --  and the funniest” (The New York Times, November 30, 1975); a Rhode Island theater canceled screenings after a protest by Jewish residents turned violent, resulting in several broken windows and a trashed lobby; the film was also declared obscene by a district court judge in Nassau County, New York, and was seized from the Bar Harbour Theater (Newsday, Nassau Edition, November 12, 1975) -- the county prosecutor had done the same thing with John Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972); the Connecticut based Maple Leaf Cinemas Inc., after a lengthy court case, pleaded guilty on two charges of obscenity for handling the film (Hartford Courant, May 7, 1976); and the film was outright banned in England, Australia, Germany and Norway.

Now, because the film was shot in California, it did not qualify for the CFDC’s capital gains allowance. This caused some problems with the financing. Said Friedman, “Cinepix sent us $10,000 to get rolling, and then the cash flow dried up.” Friedman also got fed up with Don Carmody, a Cinepix bean counter they’d sent to keep an eye on the production. “What was I going to steal? There was no money,” concluded Friedman. And things got so bad during the editing process, Friedman basically washed his hands of the whole thing and shipped all the footage and musical cues off to Canada to let them deal with it from there.

Thus, Friedman wasn’t around for the inevitable sequel, but Cinepix, Edmonds and Thorne would return for Ilsa, Harem Keeper Of The Oil Sheiks (1976), which moves things to the middle-east, where Ilsa trains a trio of abducted girls on how to properly behave as sex slaves in a harem. Jess Franco would helm an unofficial sequel, Greta, the Mad Butcher (alias Greta - Haus ohne Männer, alias Wanda, the Wicked Warden, 1977), with Thorne playing the brutal commandant of an asylum for sexually deviant women, which was also sold domestically, of course, as Ilsa, the Wicked Warden. And then Ivan Reitman officially finished it off for Cinepix with Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977), where Thorn runs a notorious gulag for Uncle Joe Stalin.

Also of note, there was almost another entry in the Ilsa oeuvre, a match of the century, with the proposed Ilsa meets Bruce Lee in the Devil’s Triangle. Of course, at the time of the film’s possible inception, Bruce Lee had tragically passed away. Not a problem, as the market was currently glutted with a rash of Bruce Lee imitators in things like The Clones of Bruce Lee (1979) with Dragon Lee, Enter the Game of Death (1978) with Bruce Le, and Exit the Tiger, Enter the Dragon (1976) with Bruce Li, whom long held rumors said Cinepix was pursuing for the role.

For the proposed plot, well, it turns out Ilsa and her “trained killer dolphins” were the reasons why so many ships and planes have disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. According to the Turan article, the film had a proposed budget of $250,000, a scheduled four week shoot, with a release date set for Christmas, 1976.

Long thought to be a lost film, according to an interview with Thorne (Horror Cult Films, October 31, 2011), it was never even shot and died in pre-production. Said Thorne, “There’s a fake review circulating on the internet of Ilsa Meets Bruce Lee in the Bermuda Triangle (-- which originated with my old Bad Movie Planet partner, The Unknown Movies). It’s all lies. There was never a script. It was never written, it was only discussed. I was told to study martial arts, which I did. I worked on the martial arts and got myself into good physical strength beyond what I already was. They were going to put it together, raise the money for it and then go from there. However there was a conflict of time and the script wasn’t ready. To cut a long story short, it doesn’t exist.” And the world weeps for what might’ve been.

Now, at this point, my Fellow Programs, you’re all probably asking or thinking the same thing: Man, he's really in the weeds on this one. I mean, What in the hell does a lurid exploitation franchise about Nazis, sexual deviants, and mass orgies have to do with a 1980s Slasher movie?! Well, we’re getting there, I promise, and this will all make sense. Trust me. Maybe.

See, the Ilsa movies were rare hits for Cinepix outside of Canada, but had raised such a shit-stink that the CFDC started tinkering with the rules on those subsidies. And so, Dunning and Link started to diversify, leaving the Maple Syrup Porn behind and embraced other genres, most notably the early body-horror films of David Cronenberg.

The Winnipeg Free Press (October 28, 1974).

“When I read a script I try to imagine a long line of people outside the theater,” said Dunning (The Montreal Gazette, November 22, 1980). “If I don’t see it, I’m not going to go ahead and do an injustice to the investors. We put in our own money with that of the investors, too, but we’re the last ones to get paid back. That means we do a lot of homework before we take a chance.” And once again, this chance paid off.

Dunning and Link had tried horror before but The Possession of Virginia (alias Satan’s Sabbath, alias The Devil Among Us, 1972) was an outright flop. Said Dunning, “The problem there was the film was just ahead of its time. The market wasn’t quite ready two years before The Exorcist (1973) was released."

But the likes of They Came from Within (alias Shivers, 1975), a frightfully and wonderfully perverse story of a high-rise infested with a sexually-transmitted killer slug, and Rabid (alias Rage, 1977), which saw a young woman become a pseudo-vampire after some botched plastic surgery, whose victims of her armpit bite become a ravenous, exponential horde of infectious zombies, were huge hits domestically and found modest distributors stateside (American International / New World Pictures), where they brought in even more money.

However, strangely enough, for a company founded on softcore and established worldwide for its horror films, Cinepix’s biggest hit would be the clean-cut, coming of age comedy Meatballs (1978), which was Reitman’s summer camp romp that also officially launched Bill Murray’s film career. But more importantly to Cinepex, the picture was picked up by Paramount and would go on to earn $46-million on its $2-million budget. But as I pointed out in an earlier review, this was too little, too clean, too late for the CFDC, making it one of the last subsidized films for Cinepix.

Never fear, for those tax shelter laws were still in place and salvation would soon come from south of the border, which would officially open the blood-gates for Canadian product.

It started in Toronto, where, hoping to cash in on the financial success of the independently produced Halloween (1978), Peter Simpson and his Toronto-based Simcon Limited backed the production of Paul Lynch’s Prom Night (1980), a teenage murder mystery with some grisly overtones. 

Shot in Canada but deliberately filmed as if it took place in the States, their completed film would then spark a bidding war between AVCO-Embassy and Paramount Pictures. Paramount would lose this battle but would essentially win the war with their Plan B: Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980), which featured a long night at Camp Blood with only one sole survivor left to tell the tale.

Both films caught fire and did inexplicably well at the box-office. With a wider distribution network, Friday the 13th did better ($60-million off of $550,000 budget) than Prom Night ($15-million on the back of $1.5-million); but still, with those profit margins, Slasher movies were suddenly hot, which brought a lot of filmmakers out of the woodwork wanting to cash in.

Speaking of, as Friday the 13th and Prom Night found their distributors, Daniel Grodnik came up with an idea to “make Halloween on a train” for Astral Films, which, like Cinepix, was based out of Montreal. They also borrowed Halloween’s star, Jamie Lee Curtis, who had also starred in Prom Night for Lynch. The end result was Terror Train (1980), which was picked up by 20th Century Fox, who would spend another $5-million on advertising, which meant the film barely broke even, taking in $8-million on a budget of $3.5-million.

Regardless, seeing the lucrative distribution deals Simcon and Astral were making, Dunning and Link decided they’d best make a similar body count picture, too; and quickly, before the bottom really fell out. As Dunning told Caelum Vatnsdal (Fangoria, November, 2004), “We were in our horror stage, and all these holidays were being taken up. There was Black Christmas (1974), there was Halloween [-- and Mother’s Day (1980), and New Year’s Evil (1980) and Graduation Day (1981)]. So Andre and I were sitting around and thinking, ‘What can we do?’ And we thought, ‘Well, no one has done anything about a birthday.’ Everybody has a birthday, so maybe we’re getting into some good ground here."

Thus, I wouldn’t be surprised if Happy Birthday to Me (1981) was intended to be the title of the film all along. However, from its conception, the production went under the title of The Secret, which had less to do with the plot and more to do with not letting anyone else in on what they were doing.

For the initial script, Dunning once again looked to John Saxton to transcribe their usual brainstorming sessions, which was yet another grisly riff on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, where a group of 10 preppies at an elite New England school start getting bumped off by an unknown killer. But there were other cinematic influences as well, with nods to Alfred Hitchcock’s notorious Macguffins and Sam Wood’s Kings Row (1942) on a few plot devices.

“I was a fan of any kind of film,” said Dunning in an interview with the Terror Trap (March, 2011). “Because of my father, I was practically born in a theater. My father was a manager, my mother sold tickets, and I sat in a high chair and watched movies beginning in the 1930s. So I had a background of over maybe 40,000 films before I started getting involved in making them.”

And as their latest film gestated from there, Dunning brought in two more writers, Timothy Bond and Peter Jobin, to help solidify things and hopefully find them an ending. “It was kind of a weird situation,” Tobin told Vatnsdal. “They gave us an outline for the story they’d written, but they already had a script by John Saxton. We didn’t know about that, and started from scratch.”

Thus, while Bond and Jobin worked through several more drafts of the shooting script, Dunning and Link started looking for a director and found one quite by accident. Apparently, around the same time, Cinepix was also in negotiations to get Charles Bronson to star in another one of his vengeful loner action / thriller films for them -- films like The Mechanic (1972), Death Wish (1974) and Telefon (1976); some of which had been directed by J. Lee Thompson -- St Ives (1976), the totally bonkers The White Buffalo (1977), and Cabo Blanco (1980).

Thompson’s first true film experience was working as an uncredited dialogue coach on Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn (1939). But he started off as a writer, and his play, Double Error, was adapted as a film twice; first as The Price of Folly (1937), and then again as Murder Without Crime (1950), which Thompson also directed. He would also write and direct the women in prison drama The Weak and the Wicked (alias Young and Willing, 1954), and would direct the Diana Dors vehicle, Blonde Sinner (alias Yield to the Night, 1956), along with the psychological thriller, Tiger Bay (1959).

But bigger and better things were in store for Thompson. It started with North West Frontier (1959) for J. Arthur Rank and The Rank Organization, which featured the epic tale of colonial India, where a British officer (Kenneth More) must effect a rescue of a young Indian prince and his white governess (Lauren Bacall) from the clutches of a rebellious faction, which was picked up by Fox and became an international hit.

He was then tapped by Columbia Pictures to direct the World War II adventure yarn, The Guns of Navarone (1961), where Gregory Peck leads a pack of international saboteurs (David Niven, Anthony Quinn) charged with knocking out a massive German gun installation. (To this day, I still play with my Marx Navarone playset, which was based on the film.)

Thompson would earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Director for his work on The Guns of Navarone, losing to Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins, and West Side Story (1961). He would also be coaxed to the States by Peck to direct Cape Fear (1962), where a defense lawyer (Peck) and his family are stalked by a paroled psychopath (Robert Mitchum) he helped put away by fudging some of the facts during his trial after seeing what kind of animal he really was. And a more tense and terse movie watching experience you’d be hard pressed to find. There’s a reason Scorcese remade it in 1991, Fellow Programs. And it wasn’t to make it ‘better.’ And if anything, I’d say he made it worse.

From there, Thompson would fluctuate between working with Peck -- Mackenna's Gold (1969), The Chairman (1969), and Yul Brynner -- Taras Bulba (1962), Kings of the Sun (1963), before he latched onto Bronson and Cannon Films to ride out the rest of his career with 10 to Midnight (1983), The Evil that Men Do (1984), Murphy’s Law (1986), Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987), Messenger of Death (1988) and Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989).

Thus, Thompson was never averse to tackling genre films, having already helmed the likes of Eye of the Devil (1988), which was kind of The Wicker Man (1973) before The Wicker Man was a thing; The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975), which asked the question, “Suppose you knew who you had been in your previous life. Where you had lived, whom you had loved, and how you had died. What then?” -- it’s a lot more sinister than it sounds; and not mention handling the last two installments of the Planet of the Apes (1968) franchise -- Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), which freaked the hell out of four-year-old-me, and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973).

See, back in 1974, when Fox encouraged the whole country to Go Ape and attend a marathon of all five Planet of the Apes films, I was there, with my siblings. Only we had to leave right after Conquest for reasons that escape me, which meant I got to see the world nuked out of existence twice in Planet of the Apes and Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970); three grisly ape homicides in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971); and the fall of mankind (Conquest) all in one setting -- skipping the catharsis of the proposed peaceful coexistence possibility of the last film (Battle).

Anyhoo, as I said, being only four at the time, I was a little wigged out by all of this. Also of note, I didn’t quite grasp the difference between “guerilla fighting” and “gorilla fighting” that we heard on the nightly news on a nightly basis back then, which got me to worrying. I mean, if Walter Cronkite said the apes were rebelling, it had to be true, right? Meanwhile, my older brothers, being assholes, quickly clued into this semantic snafu and convinced me that the time of the apes was truly upon us and the conquest of Earth had already begun! Those maniacs. But enough of my kindertrauma, back to the review.

Now where were we? Ah, yes. A Canadian Death Wish.

Now, while Cinepix would lose out on Bronson to the Go-Go Boys (Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus) and Cannon Films, it turned out Bronson and Thompson shared the same agent and they asked if he would be interested in doing their film. And to their surprise, he said yes.

It didn’t hurt that Thompson was actively looking to do a horror film at the time. You have to remember, starting with William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and running through Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (1975), Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), Phillip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy (1979) and Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror (1979), big studio horror films had gone through a bit of a renaissance; and from what little of the uncompleted script he’d read, Thompson felt the film had all the right elements to be another prestige film in that vein and signed on.

J. Lee Thompson. 

“We had considered a lot of directors, but the opportunity to work with J. Lee was there and we’d have been fools not to take it," Dunning told Vatnsdal. "I gotta tell you, he never missed anything. He was a very very nice guy, very gentlemanly. It was one of the nicest experiences I’ve had with a director.”

Said Thompson (North Bay Nugget, October 15, 1980), “First of all I was looking for a good thriller -- they’re very hard to find. Secondly, I did want to work with a bunch of young people. The fact that this picture is largely made up of young people, some of them unknowns, was my main attraction to making it. I enjoy watching this kind of film and I truly believe there’s a wealth of young talent around today.” Adding in the film’s press kit, “They challenge you. They keep you on your toes. And they remind you continually of how fortunate you were to get into this business."

But as more and more elements of the grand guignol crept into the still evolving narrative, and most likely influenced by Tom Savini’s work on Friday the 13th, two more outlandish murders were added between drafts two and three of the script. At this point, some felt the well-seasoned Thompson was making a mistake and about to take the plunge into seedy world of pure exploitation. “Going into films like this you have to face that danger,” said Thompson. “What lifts this one far above the level of an exploitative picture, I feel, is the fact that we have surrounded the moments of great graphic violence with scenes of tremendous gentleness, tenderness and good characterization."

But Thompson was no fool, adding, “There isn’t any doubt that some critics will whack me over the head. Others, I hope, will view it on the level that I’m trying to make it -- a film of total horror."

Of course, given his history, Thompson was very capable of “tightly constructed suspense dramas” that showed implied terror could be more effective than the graphic variety. But! “Unfortunately, the public today demands violence in thrillers,” said a pragmatic Thompson. “In this case, on a story level I think it’s necessary. And from a box-office standpoint one is simply giving the audience what it seems to want."

Thus, when the script was finally solidified enough to start shooting -- though work would continue on what Dunning felt was a problematic ending (-- which we’ll be addressing later, trust me), with a budget of $2.5-million, production on Happy Birthday to Me began in earnest on July 7, 1980.

And with Thompson at the helm, with some lush cinematography from Miklós Lente, the wild use of colors, dutch angles, and split-field diopters (-- always fun to play spot the blur), when combined with some truly outre and baroque story elements, their end results kinda put Happy Birthday to Me in the rarefied air as a bona fide, backdoor North American giallo -- as it has a lot more in common with the elaborate continental thrillers of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and Sergio Martino than the comparatively blunt trappings of Cunningham, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper. And it went a lot deeper than the killer's tell-tale black leather gloves.

No, something far more lurid is going on with this one as Virginia, knowing full well that Etienne is still prowling around outside somewhere, closes her bedroom window. But as the old parable about the rabbit-proof fence being useless when the rabbit is already inside the garden goes, well, her stalker was already inside the bedroom, watching the girl from the closet.

From there, the movie teases the audience with several false scares while Virginia strips down and runs a bath. (Sorry, Little House on the Prairie pervs, no nudity to report.) But hearing something over the water, the girl rushes back to her bedroom. It's empty, but that window is open again. And unnoticed by her, the girl’s discarded panties are now missing.

The next morning, as they hustle along, turns out Virginia and Ann aren't as late for class as they thought they would be. Seems Mrs. Patterson is holding up their science lecture to deliver a warning about student behavior at local places of business, and then punctuates this point by indicating she will make The Silent Woman off-limits if something like last night ever happens again. Here, she also inquires about the absent Bernadette. But all the girls can add is that she never showed up at the bar as planned. 

With that, Patterson promises to look into this further as class resumes and the professor presses on with their latest experiment: putting electrical charges into dismembered frog legs and watching them twitch. (SCIENCE!) But as Virginia watches the end results of the voltage, this triggers another violent flashback:

This time, we see a slightly younger Virginia in some kind of lab. The girl is unconscious and lying on a gurney, but we note her head is hooked up to some kind of electronic wang-doodle apparatus of ominous portent. Her father is there, along with several doctors, who observe how “her damaged brain cells are regenerating by themselves."

But before they can reveal if this is a good or bad thing, young Virginia suddenly wakes up and utters two simple words, “My birthday."

Later, Virginia relates these new memories to her shrink, who reveals she was part of a radical experiment after “the accident.” As Dr. Faraday explains, this experiment combined the same principles of how certain lizards can regenerate missing limbs with several percolating kilowatts of electricity, which resulted in a new, synthesized brain. (Wait. What?!) 

Now, Virginia still can’t remember the accident that led to this dubious scientific breakthrough, but Faraday warns not to push it, to give it more time, and promises it all will come back to her eventually.

Time passes, and we next spy the Crawford Nine gathered at the dirt track, where they watch Etienne bully his way to a win. After the others leave, Virginia stays behind and congratulates him on the win. 

Here, Etienne confirms he’s a perv by revealing he couldn’t lose because of his good luck charm -- and then produces the pair of Virginia's panties he’d swiped the night before. Disgusted by this, Virginia leaves but the camera lingers behind, spotting Alfred lingering around as well.

That evening, while Etienne has his bike up on blocks, giving it a tune up, unknown to him, a figure in white tennis shoes and black gloves stealthily makes their way into his garage. 

Sneaking up from behind while Etienne revs up the throttle, the killer grabs his scarf and throws it into the drive chain; and when it snags and pulls taut, the scarf starts to reel Etienne into the spokes of the spinning wheel like a hooked fish. And as the killer revs up the motor even further, turning the back wheel into an ersatz salad shooter, the snagged fabric sucks the victim into it and slices his head up like a ripe tomato. (Which makes you kinda wonder if it can also make julienne fries? Hi-YO!)

With three people now missing -- the two victims plus Alfred -- Ann and Virginia decide to stop by Alfred's house to check up on him. He isn’t home, but they sneak in anyway and enter a shrine dedicated to Norman Bates. 

Seems Alfred’s hobby is taxidermy, and his room is littered with stuffed and mounted animals. He also has another gruesome hobby, when they find his workbench covered with several human appendages! The girls are appalled by this, but ultimately can’t resist looking under a bloody blanket. They pull it back, revealing Bernadette’s dismembered head!

However, Alfred catches them in the act; and when he turns on the lights, it becomes quite obvious the head they found is a fake. 

Now, despite this violation of his sanctum sanctorum, after pulling out one of the fake head’s eyeballs, Alfred offers the girls could model for him -- just like Bernadette did, if they wanted to. A little weirded out, the girls decline and quickly leave.

The next day, in an effort to find her missing students, Mrs. Patterson has individual meetings with each of the remaining Ten. But when Virginia denies knowing anything, just like the rest did, Patterson starts getting a little pissy with these damned rich kids, getting away with everything, but promises she’ll put a stop to them!

But things are starting to fray internally for the remnants of the Top Ten, too. Seems Rudy is convinced Steve is trying to steal Maggie away from him. (Can confirm.) When this comes to blows between the two, Greg breaks up the fight; but not before Rudy swears if Steve ever touches Maggie again, he’ll kill him.

Our scene then shifts to a weight room, where peacemaker Greg is doing some bench presses. Finishing the first round of reps, he places the barbell on the weight-stand above his head. Here, our friend with the white tennis shoes and black gloves joins him. 

Recognizing whoever this is, Greg asks them to spot him after they add more weight to the barbell. After several more reps, the killer slides the weight-stand away from his unwitting victim just as he realizes how much weight they really added.

Startled, a nearly exhausted Greg struggles to hold the barbell above him -- otherwise he will be crushed. (We’ll assume he’s too tired to just drop it over his head and roll out of the way.) He pleads with the killer to put the stand back. 

Instead, the killer takes another loose weight and drops this on Greg’s crotch, causing him to drop the weighted barbell, which crushes his neck and triggers a volcanic eruption of blood out of the victim’s mouth.

Sometime later, Amelia shows up with some pizza but finds Greg (and the killer) gone and the bench press equipment in perfect order. (So, the killer bought a mop? And if Rudy is the killer, he just killed the wrong guy.) Also, between her arrival and the one-sided conversation Greg had with the killer, Amelia is hereby eliminated as a suspect.

Next, the ever-dwindling Crawford Ten attend a soccer game, where Alfred, the team’s goalie, stops a penalty kick. And shortly after, Rudy manages to score the winning goal before the final whistle. As the crowd storms the field, Rudy decides to screw with Maggie by asking Virginia to meet him later at the school's chapel. It works, as Maggie looks pissed. And we also note that Alfred, who obviously has a thing for Virginia, isn’t really happy about this development either.

On the way to the chapel rendezvous, Rudy stops to bury something in a campus flowerbed. (It looked like one of those Top Ten scarves to me.) Catching up with Virginia, he takes her up into the bell tower and tries his Quasimodo impersonation on her. When that doesn’t work, things take a sinister twist as he produces a knife. 

Claiming he just wants to cut the bell rope as a practical joke, but then why does he use it to back Virginia into a dark corner? Where they both disappear with nary a peep.

After an undetermined amount of time (-- as the movie really pulled one on us in that last scene, and I’m not all that sure just what the hell’s going on), the college chaplain doesn’t notice a smattering of blood on the floor when he enters the foyer below the bell tower, and more blood dripping from the ceiling. He pulls the bell rope to mark the hour but it snaps, falls, and spools up around that smattering of blood. With that, the chaplain cries murder and runs out of the building.

Meanwhile, cut to a hospital, where, as she frantically searches for Faraday, Virginia is suddenly in the grips of another violent flashback after seeing a patient that suffered some massive head trauma: 

She’s back in the hospital, and we’re treated to some rather disturbing and rather graphic scenes of her brain surgery: As the doctor cuts her skull open, he starts poking and probing into her damaged brain. But then, after a cursory examination, he declares Virginia to be a lost cause and staples her head back together before declaring, "Forget it. She's dead."

Later, Virginia tells Faraday (and the audience) about what happened after she blacked out in the chapel, thinking she was about to be attacked, claiming that when she woke up Rudy was gone. She then saw all the blood, panicked, and got the hell out of there. 

Unsure if she’s lucid or delusional, Faraday sends the girl home to get a little rest. (Geez! Where did this guy get his degree? Let's see -- The Tijuana Night School of Faith Healing and Several Holistic Pastes? Well, that would explain a few things. Also, does anyone else feel Faraday is a little too touchy-feely with his patient?) 

After she leaves, Faraday hears a news report about an incident at the chapel, how a bloody knife was found at the scene, and decides that maybe he should look into it after all and heads to the campus.

Speaking of, with four students now missing -- the known three victims and now Rudy, the cops conduct a campus wide search for clues but are getting nowhere. Being the last person to see Rudy, Virginia is interviewed by Lt. Tracy (Pennington) at the library, but his attention is soon drawn outside when something sinister is found in that flowerbed. 

This soon draws a crowd -- because who can resist the possibility of seeing a dead body? Only there isn’t one, just that scarf Rudy buried. But! Further digging unearths a human skull! But! Further inspection by Faraday shows it’s tagged as property of the Crawford science department.

Meanwhile, back in the library, a body falls from the second floor and frightens Virginia. But it’s only Rudy, alive and well. Seems that after Virginia passed out, he cut his hand to the tune of fifteen stitches while hacking through the bell rope. And her reward for not ratting him out on the prank, Virginia gets to go to the big dance with him. (Wow. Lucky girl.)

As things, forgive me, die down, Virginia and her new boyfriend, along with Steve, Amelia and Ann, head to an underground hideaway beside the campus swimming pool to smoke some reefer and try to sort things out. Rumor has it the cops are ready to start dragging the canal to find their missing friends. And here, despite the lack of any bodies, they all agree that someone is out to get the Crawford Ten.

Ever the gambler, Steve wants to place a bet on who will be the next victim; but Virginia, the only one facing the glass window to the pool, sees Maggie’s apparently dead body float by. She freaks at this and runs away as the others turn and see Maggie smiling through the glass, completing the morbid joke.

Fake or not, the images of a drowned Maggie trigger more repressed memories for our protagonist: This time we see another woman, trapped in a car under some rushing water, and we're gonna assume this is Virginia's mother.

We then shift directly to the graveyard, where Virginia is chatting with her mom again. And as the music turns sinister, we spot someone in white tennis shoes softly approaching -- but this time we pan up and see it’s Alfred. 

Sneaking up behind her, he reaches a black-gloved hand into a pocket, but before he can pull whatever it was out, the girl turns and shoves those garden shears right into his guts. (And yes, we’re supposed to notice that she’s wearing black gloves, too.) As the confused Alfred falls, we see that what he was reaching for was a small rose.

So, our killer is revealed. Or was this another one of Virginia’s psychotic delusions? With this movie, who can say for sure.

Case in point: when Virginia wakes up the next morning, unaffected by last night’s homicidal events, we can only conclude it was just another dream or delusion. Maybe. (That’s me shrugging right now.) She finds her dad packing; an emergency at work is forcing him out of town for a couple of days, but he promises to return in time for her birthday. Telling her to have fun at the dance, he leaves.

Next, the film confirms the fact that even by 1980 disco was still not dead. And as the gang boogies on down, Steve is already sick of Maggie, who is freaking out, convinced she will be the next victim. He talks Rudy into dancing with her, and as they happily reunite, Virginia turns her attention to Steve.

In full-blown floozy mode, as if possessed (-- he typed ominously), she offers her dad is gone for the weekend and invites him over for a midnight snack. He happily agrees. Concerned with her friend's erratic behavior, Ann tries to stop them. But Virginia laughs this off and says to meet her tomorrow afternoon to prepare for her birthday party.

Once they retire to her house, Virginia and Steve sit in front of the fireplace -- both heavily under the influence of drugs and alcohol, which leads to some foreplay and snogging that would have gone further but the food is finally done. You see, Virginia has cooked up a batch of skewers -- meat and veggies on a pointed stick, so, yeah, this is gonna end badly. 

She playfully feeds Steve several bites. But after he cleans off the first stick, she dips the second into some sauce -- and as he opens wide, Virginia shoves the skewer right through his mouth and out the back of his neck! Then, with a cold detachment, Virginia watches while her victim’s choking gurgles slowly peter out. Thus, dispelling any doubts that Virginia is our killer, now we just have to find out why.

The next day, when Ann arrives, she wakes Virginia up, wanting all the "gory" details about her night with Steve. But Virginia claims to not remember a thing about last night past the dance. (We note she does seem sincere.) Hoping a shower will help clear the cobwebs, all the water does is trigger more flashbacks:

She’s in a car with her mom. And Estelle is obviously drunk and very distraught over something as they travel along in a driving thunderstorm at a high rate of speed. Here, as Estelle (Acker) swears "They’ll all pay for what they did," younger Virginia proclaims she doesn’t care about any of that and begs her to slow down. 

Unfortunately, the combination of the hate, the booze, and the rain causes Estelle to miss the lights and warning horn for the drawbridge. As it rises, the car and its unlucky occupants get high-centered on the separating sides and eventually drop into the drink. (And they show us this plunge about eight times in case you missed it on the first seven.)

As the interior of the car floods, Estelle is stuck and can’t get out; but she does manage to roll down a window and tells Virginia to swim to safety. When the daughter doesn’t want to leave her, she makes it an order. Thus, Virginia escapes and her mom is doomed. But while trying to surface, Virginia is struck by the passing boat, but she and her bloodied head eventually bobs to the surface.

So, to sum up: Four years ago, Virginia and her mother were involved in a terrible accident. And while her mother perished, Virginia survived but suffered some catastrophic and inoperable brain damage. This led to the dubious galvanic experiments to regenerate the girl’s brain, which was an apparent success. (Well, maybe not.) And after an extended recovery period, the Wainwrights moved back home, where the recovering PTSD patient / science experiment's memories of the incident were slowly patched back together, which is where we came in.

Thus, with the audience all caught up at last, when Virginia snaps out of it, she's outside the shower but notices the floor is covered with water. Pulling back the shower curtain, inside the tub she sees Ann, submerged in the water, in a plum of blood, with her throat cut.

In a panic, Virginia calls Faraday over and confesses that she killed Ann. Thinking she's just having another traumatic episode, Faraday demands to see the body. When she refuses to show him, he takes her by the hand and drags her toward the bathroom, determined to confront her psychosis head on.

Sure enough, when he pulls back the shower curtain, the tub is empty and spotless, which causes the girl to faint dead away. (So was all this in her head? Has Virginia killed no one?) After reviving her, Faraday realizes there must be a link between her missing friends and her repressed memories -- and that’s why she’s been dreaming about killing them. (So it was all just a dream?!? Call of bullshit, locked and loaded and ready to fire on my command.) 

When she finally tells him about jumping the bridge with Greg and Amelia, this seems to confirm his diagnosis; as that must have triggered her repressed memories and all these homicidal delusions. (Again ... Should she really be on the loose?)

Here, the doorbell rings. It's Lt. Tracy, with word that Ann is now missing, too, and they found her car abandoned nearby. With that new wrinkle, Faraday begins to doubt his diagnosis and promises to bring Virginia in for questioning after she's head some rest. 

Taking the gloves off, metaphorically, mind you, the doctor then confronts Virginia and asks if the six missing kids had anything to do with her mother’s accident. That accusation seems to do the trick as his patient suddenly has total recall (-- about friggin’ time):

Apparently, the reason they got into the accident four years ago was because Estelle invited the six richest kids in Crawford -- Ann, Bernadette, Alfred, Steve and Greg -- to her daughter's birthday party. But when they pulled a King's Row and none of them show up (-- sorry, you’re either gonna have to read Henry Bellamann’s novel or see Sam Wood’s 1942 film adaptation to get that reference), mom is indignant and downs another fifth of Scotch.

When her father calls home, a disgusted Estelle hands the phone over to Virginia so he can apologize for not being there for her again, again. Here, the girl lies to him, saying all of her friends are there and they’re having a wonderful time. 

As Estelle continues to drink and rant and chew on the furniture, we learn that she came from the other side of Crawford's tracks, then married herself into some new money in a vain attempt to wheedle her way up the social hierarchy. And when Virginia confesses that the kids didn't come because they’re all over at Ann’s party, this so enrages Estelle she decides they will just have to go and crash it.

Despite a raging thunderstorm, Estelle, with her daughter in tow, drives over to the palatial Thomerson estate but can't get past the front gate. Undaunted, Estelle makes a scene and demands to see Ann’s father. And if we listen closely, we pick up some cryptic clues when she rips into the groundskeeper: something about not being paid off so easily this time, and we realize that Estelle and Ann’s father have a sordid history. (The plot thickens!) With much effort, Virginia drags her back to the car and convinces her to just head home. They never made it.

Back in the present, when Virginia snaps out of this and runs away, again, Faraday lets her go. But she doesn't go far, grabs a fire poker, circles back, and proceeds to bash her doctor’s head in with it. (And I will go on record stating I don’t think the human body contains enough blood to shower the walls like that.) 

Later, when Virginia’s dad returns, bearing gifts, he finds his house dark and silent. A quick search finds a room covered in Faraday's exsanguinated blood, but no body. He freaks, thinking something has happened to Virginia. When the house proves empty, he heads to her favorite spot -- her mother’s grave.

Making his way through the torrential rain to the cemetery, he finds Amelia, holding a wrapped present, in a state of muted shock. He continues on, first tripping over Faraday’s body, and then finds his wife’s grave has been dug up and her coffin empty. 

He then spots the lights in their guest cottage, where the original birthday party was to have taken place four years ago.

Inside, he finds a truly ghoulish and macabre scene: the table is still set the same way it was four years ago -- I take it no one's been in there since? -- only this time, the guests are all present and accounted for.

Propped up in their assigned seats, next to his decomposed wife, the mystery of the missing members of the Crawford Top Ten is now resolved. And as dear old dad locks up in shock, his little girl comes out of the kitchen with a birthday cake, candles aglow, singing "Happy Birthday to Me" sweetly to herself. 

Happy to see daddy, she sits him down at the table. All he can do is drop his head in his hands and cry as Virginia blows out the candles and produces a knife to cut the cake -- but then uses it to slash her dad’s throat open instead.

Unfazed, the girl then moves down the table to Ann’s body, slumped over on the table. But when she pulls the body up -- *gasp* -- It's really Virginia! 

Whoa, you say. What’s going on?! Then, the Evil and Psychotic Virginia says all that’s left to do is kill her sister, the Non-Psychotic Virginia. Wait. What!? Twins?!? She has an evil twin?!? (Fie! I call bullshit!)

But, no, they’re not twins. 

See, with one final insult to the audience's intelligence, Non-Psychotic Virginia wakes up and in the ensuing struggle manages to pull off a latex mask, revealing -- JINKIES! -- Evil and Psychotic Virginia was really Ann all along!

Somehow (-- he typed dubiously), Ann managed to drug Virginia with chloroform before each murder, and, with some (I assume) unwitting help from Alfred, had a Virginia mask made, which she donned while killing everyone else. But we still don’t know why?

Well, with a twelfth hour confession from Ann, it seems Estelle had an affair with her father. She got pregnant in the process, so Ann’s father paid Estelle to go away. But Ann’s mom still found out and divorced the creep, destroying Ann's family. 

So, guess what? They really are sisters! Well, half-sisters. But Ann has wanted revenge on Virginia's family for her father's misdeeds ever since, and focused all of that rage on her illegitimate sister since Estelle was already dead.

Why she had to kill the others is beyond me, though. That’s right. All that regenerative brain surgery crap, flashbacks, and psychotic episodes meant absolutely nothing. And with her dirty deeds all but done, Ann says this master plan and frame-up will culminate with Virginia’s apparent suicide. But when she attempts to slit Virginia’s wrists, her victim manages to fight off the chloroform long enough to grapple over the knife. And in the ensuing struggle, it is Ann who ultimately gets knifed to death.

But in one final morbid twist that would have worked better if the audience hadn't just gotten screwed over for the last hour and a half, Ann's twisted revenge scheme apparently works out in the end as the cops burst in, just in time to see Ann's body fall, leaving Virginia holding the bloody knife in a room full of corpses.

Okay. So, yeah. [Record scratch.] We really need to talk about that ending.

In hindsight, one of the biggest influences on Happy Birthday to Me, intentionally or not, was the original Hanna-Barbera cartoon series Scooby Doo, Where Are You! (1969-1970), which always featured a denouement where the seemingly supernatural culprit of the week was unmasked, to show who the real and conventional villain was all along, before the gang retired to the malt shop to celebrate another mystery solved.

Now, none of the trio of credited screenwriters on Happy Birthday to Me realized there were two separate scripts until shooting was almost wrapped up, with the production cherry-picking several key elements from both. Neither script, however, called for what was to become the film’s final twist.

In Bond and Jobin’s final draft, the killer really was Virginia all along; but their twist revealed that she had been possessed by the vengeful spirit of her dead mother, who then drove her unwitting and unaware daughter to kill all the sons and daughters of those who snubbed her in life. This, of course, actually works better and makes a helluva lot more sense than the ending they ultimately went with, which Bond and Tobin (or Sexton) had nothing to do with. No. That was all Dunning and Thompson, flying by the seat of their pants and adjusting on the fly.

“We wrote several different versions of the climactic birthday party at which the killer’s identity is revealed,” claimed Dunning in the film’s press kit. “We shot them all -- both to keep the mystery a mystery and to see which worked best. By the time we decided on an ending, most of the cast had scattered to other assignments. They won’t actually know who it was that murdered them until they see the picture with the rest of the audience.”

But I’m not so sure if this was all in service to a big elaborate production secret, or the fact that Dunning hadn’t settled on the ending he wanted until Happy Birthday to Me was well into shooting. “It was a marketing ploy,” said Dunning in the later Terror Trap interview. “Also a Hitchcockian thing. If you look at my films, you might see a lot of Hitchcock touches that went into them. J. Lee and I talked about how we could end this thing with a bang. We came back with the whole mask thing. Pull the mask off a person and reveal the actual killer. It worked.” Well, sort of.

But was this a Hitchcock thing or a Brian de Palma thing? De Palma, of course, was another Hitchcock acolyte with films like Obsession (1976) and Dressed to Kill (1980), who would inadvertently put his own personal stamp on the Slasher / Teenage Body Count genre with the final jump-scare concocted for Carrie (1976), when the arm broke out of the grave and seized Sue (Amy Irving) right before the end credits rolled. (For the record, that was really Sissy Spacek pulling off that gag, who insisted she be buried under the rocks.)

The notorious scene was itself inspired by the final shot in John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), an eerie coda of a fish-white, accusatory hand emerging from the river that also turned out to be just a dream. De Palma would take that notion and ramp it up considerably. It was a thunderclap moment, which reverberated and was stolen wholesale by Cunningham for Friday the 13th, when a water-logged Jason jumps out of the water and attacks Alice (Adrienne King); and again by Wes Craven in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), when Nancy’s mom (Ronee Blakley) is seized by Freddy Krueger and wrenched back inside the house.

And it wasn’t just them. Every thriller post-Carrie needed a late twist or a jump scare to give audiences one last jolt. Even John Carpenter cashed in, with a surely dead Michael Myers up and disappearing, leaving the audience with the indelible impression that the boogeyman was still out there, waiting to kill again -- which he would do in Halloween II (1981) and beyond.

And as Happy Birthday to Me played out, all the evidence revealed on screen betrays that the final decision on who the killer really was came very late in the game -- and so late, it nearly derailed everything. All of those blackouts, the unshakable repressed memories, the experimental brain surgery, the inexplicable loss of memory all point to Virginia’s guilt, but, nope. All a Macguffin. Also, while I do doubt they actually filmed those “multiple endings,” Dunning’s claims of keeping everyone else in the dark on whodunit were later corroborated by some members of his cast.

In her own interview with the Terror Trap (June, 2011), Lisa Langlois (Amelia) recalled, “On that film, nobody ever knew what was gonna happen, how you were going to get killed, who the murderer was, etc. I don’t know if that was just a ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ way of shooting things, with multiple plot pathways. Or whether they really, truly didn’t know and they made it up as they went along.”

But in an interview with Justin Kerswell (Hysteria Lives), when asked if he knew whether he might be the killer or not while shooting, Jack Blum (Alfred) said, logistically, “No. Aside from the final reveal between Virginia and Ann, we all knew we were not the killer. Our own deaths were scheduled in the shoot, remember?” But did they know who killed them?

“By the night of my birthday party, I didn’t know whether I’m the next victim -- or the killer,” Melissa Sue Anderson (Virginia) pointed out in the film’s press materials. And later, in her memoir, The Way I See It: A Look Back at My Life on Little House (2010), Anderson claimed the change was made because she “was so convincing as the good girl, they didn’t want to sacrifice the audience’s sympathy.” Added Dunning, “In the end, we wanted Virginia to be a good girl, and that's what drove the idea for the twist ending.”

So how did they wind up settling on Ann instead?

Well, as I said, in the original script Virginia was possessed by the spirit of her wrathful mother, which would explain her frequent blackouts and odd behavior shifts when dear old mom took over. But Dunning and Thompson felt this was too predictable and decided to make someone else responsible: Ann, who not only drugged Virginia each time to take her off the board, with (again, I assume) Alfred’s unwitting help, wore a Virginia mask while she killed Alfred, Steve and Faraday, which the film recounts with a wild montage after the big reveal to try and make it work. (There was no need to mask up for Bernadette, Etienne and Greg, but who can say for sure.)  And it does work, to a point. And while not technically a cheat, it still kinda, totally, is.

Apparently, Langlois was going to play Ann but was replaced at the last second by Tracey Bregman. “I was going to be the lead opposite Melissa Sue Anderson,” said Langlois (Terror Trap). “But then Tracey -- I call them ‘born again Canadians’ because, let's face it, being Canadian really mattered then and gave you points on these tax shelter films -- came on the scene and was offered the part. At the time, she was appearing on the [American] soap opera Days of Our Lives. So she trumped me because she had a bigger name as far as American distribution was concerned."

Tracey Bregman

Now, from what little I could understand on how Canadian tax shelter laws and the CFDC’s subsidization process worked, a production earned points on the amount of Canadian content in their film and the amount of Canadians employed as either cast or crew. And these points were needed to qualify for the tax incentives. And so, more points equaled more money. So you just need to do the math from there.

“I was seventeen when I first got cast,” said Bregman in the supplemental interview on the Kino-Lorber disc. “I had just finished my first show, Days of Our Lives, which I was on for two and half years, and this was the first movie I ever did."

The Toronto Sun (July 29, 1980). 

The casting process was a bit odd as it took place at Thompson’s house, and it was attended by both Bregman and her mother, fellow prolific TV-actor Suzanne Lloyd, who had hoped to land the role of Virginia’s mother, Estelle. And while Lloyd would lose out to Sharon Acker, Bregman was cast without even auditioning.

For the first two weeks of filming, it was just Anderson and Bregman; and then the rest of the cast started trickling in. As Langlois remembered, “It seemed that as time went on, Tracey’s role got bigger and bigger, and more elaborate. And that was the final thing; that she was given this prize of being the murderer and it was exciting."

As to why that happened, Bregman had a few theories, saying at some point, “Thompson started calling me ‘Crazy.’ I don’t know if he ever called me Crazy prior to what happened as to why the film was changed or if it was after as to why the entire ending was changed.” As to why the entire ending was changed, I’ll let Bregman explain:

“We had a huge group scene at the school. Hundreds of extras. And everybody is supposed to run from all over; I mean, it was a huge, huge wide shot. All of us in the Top Ten had our spots, our marks, where we needed to end, so the camera would be able to see all of us. And as I was getting to my mark, one of the extras whipped an arm out and quickly pointed in the opposite direction and hit me right in the throat.”

The scene in question was the discovery of the faux skull planted in the flower bed of the campus quad by Rudy. And after getting clothes-lined by the extra, “By the time I got to my mark, I was laughing,” said Bregman. “It was a very serious scene and I was laughing, choking; and I got to my mark, did what I had to do and, Oh. My. God. Thompson went crazy. ‘Stop! Stop! You’ve ruined the whole shot! We have to do the whole thing over again!’ Omigod, he was so mad at me.”

But Thompson didn’t stay mad for long, according to Bregman. “When they watched those dailies. Something happened. That I would have such a weird reaction.” Something clicked. “And they rewrote the whole ending of the movie."

Bregman didn’t find out about this change until a few days later, on the eve of filming her death scene. “My character was supposed to drown in a bathtub,” said Bregman. But that evening, the actor was invited out to dinner by Irene Litinsky, Dunning’s executive assistant, who broke the news about her promotion. “‘By the way,’ she said, ‘you’re the murderer.’ And I was like, wait. What?! I’m filming my death scene tomorrow. How on earth am I the murderer?!”

But Litinsky explained the gaslighting plan with the tub, the masks, and the last second reveal. And so, they shot the ending with all the other actors, but Bregman recalled she had to return several weeks later for some reshoots on her own.

“We had shot the ending with all the other actors, with Melissa Sue Anderson, and I guess they needed more closeups of me or something,” said Bregman. “I literally had a plate stuck to me with a knife in it, with tubes that went around the back, with these tubes then going into two massive tubs of fake blood and two guys pumping. And the thing squeaks. So I’m doing my death scene and -- ‘squeak’ ‘squeak’ ‘squeak’ --  I’m like, omigod. Maybe that’s why they made me come back. I was like, What’s going on behind me? Does anybody have any WD-40 or something?”

“The new ending was essentially put together by Dunning and Lee on the set,” Jobin told Vatnsdal. “We just heard, ‘Oh, we got a great new ending!’ But it was a drag. There was no preparation for it in the script, so it didn’t make sense."

Of course, this 12th-hour revelation and rug-pulling pretty much made all of Virginia’s flashbacks and the whole brain surgery subplot completely irrelevant. Notions on the girl’s damaged brain came early in the scripting process. As Dunning told Vatnsdal, “I found an article where they were regenerating frogs with electricity, so we dreamed up a story where they regenerate a girl’s brain with electrical charges.”

As for the scene itself, “We had an actual brain surgeon do that scene,” said Dunning. “He was from the Montreal Neurological Center, and although he had a fake brain, which was built in Los Angeles, he actually performed the operation [on it]. He volunteered to do that.”

Oddly enough, the transitions when one of those flashbacks gets triggered are kinda the best part of the picture, where the camera cocks to the side, the lighting changes into a harsher hue before the image is light-blasted off the screen right before the cut to the past. Alas, the effectiveness of the phantasmagorical surgery scenes are short-circuited a bit as they are left to kinda die on the vine once they became redundant with the patient’s exoneration.

This mid-production change also called for a plaster cast of Anderson’s whole head so the effects team could make a latex mask of her face to get pulled off of Bregman. This, of course, opens up a whole other can of plot worms: namely, where did the mask come from? My best guess would be it was Alfred’s handiwork.

To make the Mission: Impossible-level reveal work -- hell, the whole thing to work, the likeness proves way too good to be taken from a free sculpt, which means in the film Alfred would’ve had to make a cast of Virginia’s face, too -- like the one he did of Bernadette. But when did he make Virginia’s? Most likely while the girl was unconscious through Ann’s machinations and her handy bottle of chloroform. It’s the only thing that makes sense in context of the movie as it plays out.

This, of course, brings the range of Alfred’s culpability into further question. How involved was he? Was he that big of a creep? Was he being blackmailed somehow? Was Bernadette alive or dead when he made her head sculpt? Who was that flower really for? Was he crushing on Virginia, and this was the only way to get close to her, or was he crushing on Ann, helping her in this mad scheme to ingratiate himself, only to wind up being a loose end that needed to be tied off? That’s me shrugging right now.

Apparently, earlier drafts of the script fleshed Alfred out quite a bit, and also focused more on Virginia's complicated relationship with her father. And what’s doubly frustrating is, the film already had a great final twist in its back pocket all along, without all these shenanigans, with that delightfully morbid, "Oh, shit," moment when Virginia gets caught red-handed by Lt. Tracy, which would’ve worked whether she was innocent or not -- admittedly, this is more of a gut punch with an innocent Virginia framed for a half-dozen murders. Well, at least until she points out the mask Ann was wearing.

Also, Ann must’ve been one hell of an impressionist when it came to Steve’s death. Until then, with all the other deaths, we never see the killer’s face, who remains awkwardly silent while they do the deed. Also, not to sound like too much of a knuckle-dragging chauvinist, I did get hung up on how Ann could've gotten Greg's personal gym back in order with that kind of weight on the barbell -- until I realized someone that cunning would obviously remove all the weights before putting it back on the stand, and then add the weights back on one at a time. In the end, I guess you either roll with it or you don’t. And how far you want to go punching implausibility holes in the narrative or stretch your disbelief’s suspension is up to each individual viewer.

Thus, while trying to pull off the impossible, “I literally could not be around any other of my classmates in their makeup,” said Bregman, commenting on the film’s grisly climax, where all the victims are propped up around the table for the callback birthday party. “It was so real, I got sick to my stomach. I was the only murderer with a queasy stomach. Wow. The makeup was incredible.”

Originally, Dunning hired Stephan Dupuis to handle the massive special makeup effects needed for Happy Birthday to Me. Dupuis would assist Chris Walas on the head detonations in Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) and the grisly Brundlefly transformations in The Fly (1986). On the Cinepix film, he would be assisted by Michelle Burke, who had worked on Terror Train, and Tom Schwartz, who also worked on Scanners.

“There’s a fine line between where ordinary makeup stops and special effects makeup begins,” Burke explained to Julia Maskoulis (The Montreal Gazette, August 1, 1980). According to the article, they had to cook up something special for a total of eleven murders to be showcased in Happy Birthday to Me, and were currently working on the artificial head for the killer to ram the skewer through, making it a human shish-kebab. Said Burke, “The fun part of the job is to imagine what a head with a skewer in it should look like. Sometimes you have to do research.”

“Anything goes in makeup,” explained Dupuis in the same interview. “There are no rules. You use whatever you can to get the effect you want.” Added Burke, “It’s constant problem solving. You have to be a little crazy to do it.”

The Montreal Gazette (August 1, 1980).

Both Dupuis and Burke belonged to the Syndicat National du Cinema, a Canadian film union. In fact, at the time, they were the only members with special makeup effects experience, which, again, was important to those tax shelter points. But right before the cameras were ready to roll on principle photography, feeling the young technician had bitten off more than he could chew, Dunning decided to let Dupuis and his team go and replace them -- meaning odds are good that quoted article was published after they were fired off the picture. As to why Dunning let him go:

“Dupuis was just learning his craft at the time,” said Dunning (Terror Trap). “At the time, we felt we needed a more seasoned special effects man. Don't get me wrong: Dupuis was very good. But he hadn’t mastered the full technique of some of the special effects that had to be done. That was all. We felt that in order to survive this film, we had to get the best we could find.” And what he found was Tom Burman, whose Burman Studios was based out of Los Angeles.

 John Chambers (Left), Tom Burman (Right).

“We had about three weeks between being hired and the beginning of the shoot,” Burman recalled to Vatnsdal. “Someone else was doing the picture, and I think they just lost confidence in him -- he was only 18 or 19 at the time.” Dupuis would also be dismissed from Visiting Hours (1982), another Canadian Slasher, for undisclosed reasons.

Burman got his start working for John Chambers on The Planet of the Apes, which was groundbreaking in the use of prosthetics. From there, he provided special makeup and monsters on things like Frogs (1972), The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), The Manitou (1978), and the aforementioned remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

A headless John Lehne (sitting) and Burman. (Carny, 1980). 

Of course, on top of the short notice, Burman faced the challenges of an ever-evolving script, saying, “If you could have sat in on those writer and producer meetings back then, it was a crack-up, because they were saying, ‘How do we cut this guy’s head off differently?’ and ‘How can we do this murder in some bizarre way?’ I was saying, ‘What about the story? Tell me something about the story!’”

As Vatnsdal pointed out in his retrospective, “considering the late changeover in the FX personnel and the still unsettled resolution of the story, the shooting of the film’s gory tidbits came off well -- even if, Burman says, ‘There was a genuine lack of understanding even by J. Lee Thompson on how these effects work.’” But, said Burman, “Thompson was willing to take our suggestions about things like the motorbike scene. It was written stupidly in how it was supposed to happen. But I like to write, and I had a chance to rework things like that."

Burman would be assisted by his own crew, consisting of Eddie Henriques, Tom Hoerber and Ken Diaz. “They knew how I worked, and that helped a whole lot,” said Burman. “It was a lot of gelatin appliances and heads. Gelatin was fairly new at the time, and carried on from our work on Body Snatchers.”

But Thompson was a fast learner on the art of gore, and things soon got out of hand. “He’d take a bucket of (faux) blood and whip it around,” said Dunning with a laugh (Terror Trap). “With Tom Burman’s help, he’d be splashing blood ALL over the place.” Added Langlois (Terror Trap), “That's something he was very famous for on that set, slinging lots of fake blood all around!”

Some of Thompson's handiwork from a deleted scene. 

Apparently, Thompson had recently quit smoking. And when he wasn’t tearing up bits of paper and crushing them to keep his mind off the nicotine on set, he would replace that addiction with blood-letting. He would do the same thing on 10 to Midnight, one of those Bronson vehicles the director did for Cannon, where the lead character took on a serial rapist and murderer. (We reviewed it at the old Bloggo.) And, like Dunning, they had to rein him in on that one, too. 

Said Dunning, “The cameraman came to me and said, ‘John, you’ve gotta slow J. Lee down. He’s throwing too much blood around, and the camera lenses are always covered in it!’ I had to go to him and tell him to tone it down so we could clean up the crew. (Laughs.) He really put his heart into it."

The FX showcase and greatest challenge of the film was the grand and gruesome finale at Virginia’s birthday party, with all the corpses, in several stages of putrification, including her exhumed mother, sitting around the table. According to several sources, the whole scene took about a week to shoot and proved very arduous for the “deceased,” who were all present in makeup.

Said Blum (Hysteria Lives), “I was delighted (to be killed) with the garden shears. From an actor's point of view, I wanted the easiest job possible. My friend Matt Craven's demise (Steve) with the barbecue skewer was infinitely more complicated and difficult; and his week as a dead guy, holding that shish-kabob skewer in his mouth, entirely less comfortable -- imagine trying to eat lunch with that makeup."

“That was a big job,” Burman told Vatnsdal, which required all of his assistants. And one of the film’s longest running onset rumors is how his corpses kept wandering off in full makeup to “take a stroll around the small Quebec town in which the film was partially lensed, shocking the residents with gory winks and blood-soaked waves of the hand.” But did this really happen? Well, sort of.

According to the Blum interview, he declared, “I have no recollection of any kind of group mayhem. Memory fails, but I dimly recall one of the actors -- Matt? He was entirely capable of this kind of thing -- wandering off set to have a bit of fun in that regard. I wouldn't swear to it, though.” But in her interview with Kerswell, Lesleh Donaldson (Bernadette) remembered that, “Richard Rebiere (Greg) and I took a stroll around the block, which led us up to the main street -- St. Catharines. I remember a kid on a bike almost fell off in shock. Lots of goofy fun."

Anderson, Burman, and a masked Bregman.

What we do know for sure about shooting the finale, at least according to Bregman, “All I know is that it took my face and skin months to recover from the mask ripping. It took layers and layers of skin off.”

And so, in the end, six of the Crawford Ten meet their demise at the hands of Burman and Bregman in Happy Birthday to Me, with a few lucky ones escaping Ann’s wrath, including Amelia -- at least in the film’s final edit. In the finished film, we last see Amelia getting left behind by Virginia’s father as he makes his way to the guest cottage. However, according to Langlois (Terror Trap), “I got hit with an ax. What I remember is I had the gift. And I’m standing there in the rain, holding the birthday present. Catatonic. And then boom, I got the ax in the head.”

This death is confirmed in the film’s press materials, as one of the lobby cards shows Amelia / Langlois screaming, covered in blood; a scene that did not make the final cut (-- and more on this excision in a second). "I remember shooting that scene,” said Langlois. “Lee threw a big cup of blood on my face and body. I got blood all over my head. It dyed my hair red. (Dunning had to pay to have it professionally removed.) I recall the splattering of all the blood and then they shot some footage on the ground with the ax going into something that was supposed to be my head.”

Apparently, Lenore Zann (Maggie) and David Eisner (Rudy) weren’t on the hit list -- or maybe they were, as the finished film has nine deaths while the original FX team were planning on 11 fatalities. I would guess they got a pass on time concerns and budget constraints.

“The difference between a good chiller and exploitative junk is whether or not you care about the victims,” declared Thompson (Press kit). Topping off the cast list was Melissa Sue Anderson, an American actress best known for playing Mary, the eldest daughter of the Ingalls clan on the TV-series Little House on the Prairie (1972-1982), which were based on the autobiographical books by Laura Ingalls Wilder that chronicled life on the Great Plains in the late 1800s.

But as the show progressed, it became less about the family and focused more on Mary’s little sister, Laura (Melissa Gilbert), and Anderson’s character became a bit of a punching bag and kind of a running joke.

“Talk about horror stories,” reported Anderson with a laugh in the Happy Birthday to Me press kit. “After what happened to me in Little House, it was almost a relief to be chased by a berserk killer,” said Anderson. “During seven years on the series, I survived scarlet fever and a toxic appendicitis, lost two babies, and went blind. I was the series’ token tragedy. Whenever they ran low on story ideas, someone suggested, ‘What can we do -- that’s really awful -- to Melissa?’” 

So, by 1980, Anderson was ready to stretch her legs a bit as an actor. She would appear in the Made for TV-Movie Midnight Offerings (1981), where she played a bona fide evil teenage witch running amok in the suburbs. Anderson would co-star here with Mary Beth McDonough, who was similarly trying to break away from her wholesome reputation as middle-sister Erin on The Waltons (1972-1981), another family melodrama. McDonough would get her own Slasher the very next year with Mortuary (1982), a rather intractable whodunit.

Both Anderson and McDonough had high profiles due to their TV-roles, making them recognizable to distributors and audiences. Funnily enough, Eve Plumb -- who played Jan Brady on The Brady Bunch (1969-1974) -- was originally cast to play the lead in Prom Night, too, but got bumped at the last moment when reigning Scream Queen Jamie Lee Curtis became available.

Said Dunning (Terror Trap), “Melissa was Miss Goody-Two-Shoes out on Little House on the Prairie, and she wanted to do something with some ‘meat’ on it and get her acting chops. This was a good chance. And she wasn’t charging too much because she really wanted to do it. Plus, once we landed her, we had all the publicity chances you could find. She was very good."

Like Bregman, Happy Birthday to Me would be Anderson’s first feature. And there would be no going back as her TV-character, whom she had played for nearly half of her life at the time, was conspicuously written out of Little House on the Prairie not long after appearing in the film, which was no skin off of Anderson’s nose. “It’s just a matter of moving on for me,” she said (The Toronto Star, September 3, 1981). “I’ve done about everything I could do with the character.” The show would be canceled two years later.

Anderson’s presence was a boon to be sure, but aside from Thompson, the film’s ‘big get’ was undoubtedly actor Glenn Ford. Unlike Anderson and Bregman, Happy Birthday to Me would be Ford’s 221st feature. He started at Fox in the western Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1939) before signing on with Columbia for a string of B-Pictures -- Convicted Woman (1940), Men Without Souls (1940) and Babies for Sale (1940).

His big break came in 1940, co-starring with Rita Hayworth in the courtroom drama The Lady in Question (1941), causing Bosley Crowther to declare (The New York Times, February 28, 1941), "Glenn Ford, a most promising newcomer, draws more substance and appealing simplicity from his role of the boy than anyone else in the cast."

From there, Ford’s career skyrocketed, co-starring with Hayworth again in Gilda (1946), and then really made some hay in a string of westerns, including The Man from the Alamo (1953), The Violent Men 1955), the Delmer Daves masterpiece, 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and Cimarron (1960), as well as some film noir classics like A Stolen Life (1946), Framed (1947), and Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953). Not to mention other classics like Richard Brooks’ Blackboard Jungle (1955), Pocketful of Miracles (1961), Experiment in Terror (1962), and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963).

Born Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford in Glenford, Alberta, Ford was also another expat Canadian, who would look good on the books as “native content.” He was recently coming off roles as Pa Kent in Richard Donner’s Superman (1979) and Giulio Paradisi’s totally bonkers mash-up of Carrie and Close Encounters of the Third Kind -- better known as The Visitor (alias Stridulum, 1979), as well as taking part in Kinji Fukasaku’s equally bonkers Virus (alias Fukkatsu no hi, 1980), a star-studded and nearly inexplicable nihilistic take on the end of the world. So a horror film wouldn’t be too big of a stretch for the actor.

Over his career, Ford had been married twice and partook in numerous affairs with the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Renay, Debbie Reynolds and Brigitte Bardot, which resulted in two divorces. In 1977, Ford would marry again, this time to Cynthia McCabe. He was 61, she was 29. And McCabe would accompany her husband back to Canada for the entire 10-week shoot, which, turned out, caused all kinds of headaches for the production.

Glenn Ford

Said Dunning (Terror Trap), “Well, as you know, this was towards the end of his career. He was certainly drinking too heavily. And he had just found himself a trophy wife, and so they were still in a blissful mood when they came up together for the filming.” Blissful, and in Ford’s case, extremely paranoid.

At one point, production was halted and Dunning had to be called to the location, where he found Ford locked in his rental car, with his wife, and he refused to get out. Apparently, a local spectator was sitting out on his porch, watching them film, when he either waved at Cynthia or snapped a wolf-whistle at her. This so incensed Ford, he retreated into the car and would not come out until the spectator, who was on his own property, either apologized or was forced to leave.

“We had this motorcycle escort around at the time because of the traffic and shooting on location,” said Dunning (Terror Trap). “The cop came over and asked what the problem was. I said he had to get the guy away, or Glenn wouldn’t come out. So the officer motored over to the man and words were exchanged. The guy finally went inside. I asked the cop what he said to the man to get him to go in, and he said, ‘I told the son of a bitch if he didn’t go inside, I’d shoot him.’ I don’t know if that was true or not, but at least we got the guy in the house and Glenn out of the car.”

But Ford would wind up locked inside the car, refusing to come out again, again, after he petulantly punched Charles Braive, one of the film’s assistant directors, in the face for having the temerity to call a lunch break in the middle of shooting one of Ford’s scenes.

The North Bay Nugget (October 15, 1980).

“Yes. He hit our AD,” said Dunning. “I had to stop the police from arresting him. It was a mess. Glenn wouldn’t come out until the first AD apologized, who said he would never apologize to Glenn. But I told him this might be the end of his career as an AD if he didn’t. So, he went and said he was sorry. And Glenn said he was sorry. They kissed and made up. As far as I know, Glenn never hit anybody else.”

Luckily, Thompson was someone who knew how to handle temperamental stars. Said Dunning, “Ford respected Lee and vice versa.” And so, beyond these two dust-ups, “[Ford] was a thorough professional. He knew his lines and he was on his mark. He never failed. The trouble really only came with Glenn’s feelings for his trophy wife. He was so overprotective of her. And the fact that he wanted to drag her around all the time. We were trying to get people to take her shopping, you know? Spend some of Glenn’s money that he was making from us!”

As for the rest of the cast, again, Bregman was just coming off of her role of Donna Craig on Days of Our Lives but would then jump ship to another soap, The Young and the Restless (alias The Young and the Rowdy -- according to my mom), playing Lauren Fenmore from 1983 to present. Both Jack Blum and Matt Craven had appeared in Meatballs -- as Spaz and Hardware respectively. (Circled above.) Blum was a last second replacement on that film, taking over for Eddie Deezen, who did 1941 (1979) instead. Lisa Langlois auditioned for Meatballs, too, but had some bad luck on the timing of it. Said Langlois (Terror Trap), “I just had my wisdom teeth out and I was swollen like crazy and looked really awful. Like a chipmunk, all bruised. Needless to say, I didn’t get the part in Meatballs.”

But even without that role, the actor was already a well-seasoned veteran, having appeared in two Claude Chabrol films -- Blood Relatives (alias Les liens de sang, 1978), a murder mystery, and Violette (alias Violette Nozière, 1978), a coming of age psychodrama. She also appeared in John Huston’s Phobia (1980), where some radical aversion therapy ideas lead to murder. She would co-star in that film with David Eisner (Rudy), who would join her in Happy Birthday to Me.

“It's tough when you’re making a film with a group,” said Dunning. “It’s nice to make a film with two people. To be honest, when you have six or seven people, and you have to kill them all in different ways, all you’re thinking about is the next killing. And with Happy Birthday to Me, that's all I was thinking about: how to make the next kill as interesting or as unique as possible, for a Slasher movie. Other than that, I thought all of the cast worked fine.”

The majority of the picture was shot in and around Montreal, using the campuses of Loyola College, Concordia University and McGill University. “The choices were relatively easy,” said Thompson (Press kit). “We had our pick of several gothic campuses.”

Thus, the production's biggest headache was finding a bridge they could use to shoot both the game of chicken and the accident that plunges Virginia and her mother into the river. But, “Most of the ones we found couldn’t take the stress of our crane cameras and other equipment,” said Stuart Harding, a line producer on the film (Press kit). And those that could, “the authorities made it clear they weren’t about to tie up traffic to let a bunch of movie people stage a dangerous stunt.”

Harding eventually found his salvation south of the border in Phoenix, New York, which is just outside of Syracuse and had just what he needed. “It’s what is called a double-leaf bascule drawbridge, which splits in the center and pivots upward to form an inverted ‘V.’” The bridge was built in the 1920s to span across a tributary of the Erie Canal, and was maintained by the New York State Department of Transportation. (The bridge has since been demolished.)

“Visually, it’s a knockout,” said Harding. “And we kept our fingers crossed until an engineering study was completed and a permit issued. The day we filmed was like a local holiday. Police and volunteer fire departments were on hand to help out, along with almost everyone in town. Most businesses simply shut down.”

The driving stunts would be handled by stunt coordinator Max Kleven, who worked out the sequences with Thompson. Kleven’s only real concern would be the steep inclines of the roadway once the bridge opened. For the game of chicken stunt, the motorcycle and the first car made the jump and landed safely without any problems; but the third car, a Pontiac Firebird (-- it was a Trans Am, trust me), landed nose down and was totaled. But that was nothing when compared to getting the shot of Estelle Wainwright’s T-Bird taking its plunge into the river in the driving rainstorm.

Said Harding, “It wasn’t easy. We rigged the car on a cable, with a quick release. The first one hit the water at the wrong angle and crumpled like a tin can. On another try, the car flipped over wrong-side-up. And before we had what we wanted, we managed to sink three T-Birds.” And to my eye, regardless of how the cars landed, it appears all three of these attempts were edited into the finished film no matter how the car landed.

And for the harrowing interior shots for the car’s submersion, three more identical T-Birds had to be found and sunk. When filming at the bridge finally wrapped, fifteen vehicles had been destroyed and one stunt driver wound up hospitalized with a pair broken ankles. And credit to Anderson and especially Acker for participating in that water stunt.

Writers Guild picket lines (Robert Landau, 1981).

Now, when Happy Birthday to Me was well into shooting, meanwhile, down in Hollywood, a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) strike was well underway and the Writer's Guild of America (WGA) was ready to walk, too. Both were in an effort to negotiate proper compensation on the newly expanding markets of Pay-TV on cable and satellite and the recent epoch explosion of home video cassettes as VCRs got cheaper and became common household items. The SAG-AFTRA strike would last from July 21st through October 23rd, 1980, and the WGA strike would finally hit on April 11, 1981, with production shut down on TV and film until the work-stoppage ended three months later on July 12.

Thus, in the middle of all that labor strife, unsure of how long it would last, studios were scrambling to find product to fill out their release schedules as leverage to drag things out and survive the strikes as long as possible. At Columbia, John Beach, the studio’s vice president, was keenly aware that some of the studio's old stalwarts -- J. Lee Thompson and Glenn Ford -- were shooting a horror movie up in Canada.

SAG picket lines. (The Los Angeles Times, July 25, 1980).

And perhaps spurred on by the other studios’ profit margins distributing these cheap Slashers -- Paramount: Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), Night School (1981), The Boogens (1981), Fox: Terror Train, MGM: He Knows You’re Alone (1980), Universal: The Funhouse (1981), Filmways: The Burning (1981) -- Beach took a trip to Montreal and had a meeting with Dunning and Link, who showed him the dailies. “He liked what he saw,” Dunning told Vatnsdal. “And we cut a deal. We sold the film outright for $3.5-million. So it was a big deal.”

Depending on the source you consult, the final budget for Happy Birthday to Me runs anywhere between $2.25-million and $5-million. As we mentioned in a previous review, Dunning and Link would immediately take the profits from that sale and funnel them into the leaner and meaner My Bloody Valentine for Paramount, which went into production the second after Happy Birthday to Me wrapped -- with another assist from Burman and his crew on the outstanding FX. And while shot later, My Bloody Valentine would beat Happy Birthday to Me into theaters to meet a required release date of Valentine’s Day, 1981, a Saturday, right after a Friday the 13th.

Meanwhile, Columbia took over the film in the post-production phase and started tinkering, mostly on the music, beefing up Bo Harwood’s lyrical score with some additional music by Lance Rubin, who composed the film’s signature main theme and the “love theme” end credits song, which was performed by Syreeta Wright, a Motown artist, who was probably most famous for almost replacing Diana Ross as a member of The Supremes and being Stevie Wonder’s girlfriend for a spell. (The two would marry in 1970 but would divorce in 1972).

It was Columbia who also cooked up the iconic poster art and nonsensical ad campaign for Happy Birthday to Me. And they would spend nearly the same amount on advertising ($3-million) as they did on actually buying the film ($3.5-million). Said Peter J. Boyer (The Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1980), “Columbia Pictures had this little marketing problem: how to peddle its bloody, psycho-killer movie in a marketplace already hip-deep in gore.” What they came up with was “so blatant in its try for shock it borders on parody.” For the film’s poster and ads, they feature “the horrified countenance of a young man confronted with the implement of his death -- a fully loaded shish kebab.”

Pretty straight forward, right? Absolutely, thus, the nonsensical part comes into play with the poster’s tagline: “John will never eat shish kebab again. Steven will never ride a motorcycle again. Greg will never lift weights again. Who’s killing Crawford High’s snobbish top ten? At the rate they’re going, there will be no one left for Virginia’s birthday party … alive.”

Intriguing, and rather catchy, sure, but, remember, it was Steve who got skewered, Etienne who got shredded by the motorcycle, and Greg gets short shrift on the iron-pumping. I don’t even know who the hell John is, but I’m guessing they left Etienne out because people couldn’t pronounce it properly or feared it would be mistaken for some arty-farty foreign film, which it technically was.

The Los Angeles Times (May 15, 1981).

These same advertising materials also boasted “Six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see” but only delivered on maybe … half of them? And while batting .500 would land you in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, horror film fans aren’t so easily swayed. But, feh, details.

“You’re going to the movie to see somebody get it with a shish kebab,” Ken Blancato told Boyer. “The names are irrelevant.” At the time, Blancato was Columbia’s vice-president of advertising, and he was responsible for Happy Birthday to Me’s highly evocative campaign. “You have to launch an exploitative campaign, because this is an exploitation film.”

Marvin Antonowsky, then head of Columbia’s marketing department, found Blancato’s efforts clever. “I knew we needed a striking visual,” said Antonowsky. “My gut told me as soon as I saw that poster that it worked. It’s all a matter of pushing the right buttons among the right audience. In this case, it’s teenagers. This is clearly a teenage audience. That’s the market for this picture.”

But startling graphics sometimes aren’t enough. “People like to root against somebody,” theorized Antonowsky. “People don’t like to see people get killed at random, no way. To have people killed, they have to be people you’re rooting to have killed. So, that became part of our campaign -- The 10 snobs at Crawford High. Nobody likes snobs.”

Now, I promised to try and explain this earlier, and now seems to be as good a time as any to shoehorn this in, so here goes: A preparatory school like the Crawford Academy is a type of an elite, private high school, either parochial or secular (-- and a bit of a relic by 1980), where students take specialized courses for a specific field of study in preparation for college admissions. But unlike public schools, they require a tuition fee and have very selective admission standards for students aged 13-18. An opportunity for some, a way for the privileged to get an unfair advantage and keep the riff-raff (re: minorities) out to others. Anyhoo…

Things get a little confusing from there since the Crawford 10 are also in that age range but hang out at a bar, are served, and openly drink beer. One could assume they all had fake IDs, but they’re always wearing school gear. A dead giveaway. But I think the honest answer for this gaffe lies in the fact that in Quebec, where the film was written and shot, the legal drinking age was 18 at the time. However, after some digging, that might not be the case.

In America, at the time of production, the legal drinking age varied from state to state. After the 21st Amendment became law in 1933, which repealed the 18th Amendment and effectively ended Prohibition, nearly every state set a minimum drinking age of 21 to legally purchase alcohol. But this changed in 1971 with the ratification of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18, where some states, including Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and several other of their New England compatriots, where Crawford Academy was allegedly located, also lowered the legal drinking age to 18. (Hey, if you’re old enough to get drafted and serve, you’re old enough to vote and have a beer in my book.) 

So, we can let that Silent Woman stuff slide with a sideways glance because it wasn’t until 1984 when Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act to crackdown on teenage drunk driving, which required all states to raise the age for purchase and public possession back to 21 across the board by 1986 or lose a chunk of their federal funding. Thus, by mid-1988, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had raised their purchase ages to the uniform standard that we still have today. (And does anyone else get hung up on crap like this, sending you spelunking down several online rabbit holes, or is it just me?)

The Grand Island Independent (July, 1960).

Meantime, in another nod to Hitchcock, the marketers also added a WARNING: "Because of the bizarre nature of the party, no one will be seated during the last ten minutes . . . Pray you're not invited.”

Now, while negotiating the sale to Columbia, Dunning surrendered any notions of a final cut but did manage to get a clause in where they would be consulted and have a say on the film’s advertising campaign. Said Dunning (Terror Trap), “We were given the privilege of okaying the advertising and using us as advisers, consultants. We had that right.”

And so Dunning and Link were brought to California for a presentation, which didn’t go well and was a trifle one-sided. Said Dunning, “We saw the advertising. You know, the skewer in the guy’s mouth. And we went before the chief of advertising (Antonowsky) and told him we thought it was a little strong.” Basically, they found this to be too blunt, thought it was a mistake to concentrate on just one of the killings, and felt an air of mystery would sell it better. No soap, as Antonowsky basically told them ‘Your contract said you could advise on the campaign. You’ve advised. Now there’s the door.’

Still, Dunning had few regrets about the deal with Columbia. “We grabbed it because our investors had a good chance to get their money back,” said Dunning. And what happened after the sale, well, “It didn’t matter to us because we sold it outright. The investors were happy: they got their money back plus a big bonus. It was a good experience.”

Before its release, Happy Birthday to Me had one last hurdle to clear with the MPAA, who initially slapped it with an X-rating due to its excessive violence and gore. “The murder victims in this picture refused to stay put,” said Burman (Press kit). “My job was to bring them back to life -- or death -- as scarily as possible. It’s what we call ‘graphic repulsion.’” Only Burman apparently did his job too well.

The film would be submitted and rejected several times. And to finally get the needed R-rating, the following scenes were removed: Bernadette's throat gushing blood; a graphic image of Etienne being mutilated by the dirt bike; gruesome brain surgery shots; a bloodier impact and aftermath of the bench press on Greg; a more violent bludgeoning of Dr. Faraday with the poker; and Amelia’s death by ax had to be removed altogether.

Said Langlois (Terror Trap), “My boyfriend at the time was David Douglas, one of the camera operators on Happy Birthday to Me. He told me if they had kept that scene with the ax to my head, it would’ve meant the film would be saddled with an X-rating. They didn't want that, of course. So instead, they cut that scene out and I ended up being the lone survivor.”

However, in that 2011 interview with the Terror Trap, Dunning made it clear that all the excised portions of the film were still available. Said Dunning, “We moved recently. And in that move, we just discovered a box of some cuts that were made on Happy Birthday to Me. We’re going to put the trims together, and we’re going to compare it to the U.S. release and see what’s missing.”

At the time, Dunning had hoped to convince Columbia to patch it all back in and release an uncut version of Happy Birthday to Me on DVD, which he had just managed to do with Paramount on the restoration of My Bloody Valentine, which had also been neutered by the censors for its theatrical cut, as part of the build-up to the release of that film’s remake in 2009. (We talked about this in our recent review of My Bloody Valentine.)

“Paramount did it with My Bloody Valentine,” said Dunning. “They put the cut pieces back in that I had stored away all those years. We’ve been after Columbia for god knows how long to bring Happy Birthday to Me out in its original form, too, and put the cuts back in. They can do that now. But as you know, they're a huge studio and they don’t give a damn about something that happened 30-years ago.”

As usual, there’s the long standing rumor of an uncut Japanese release of the film floating out there somewhere in the ether, along with several rather graphic “proof of life” stills of Etienne getting shredded by the motorcycle, the aftermath of Greg’s throat getting crushed, and, of course, the lobby card that seals Amelia’s true fate.

Thus, it was the heavily censored version of Happy Birthday to Me that would premiere on May 15, 1981, and would go on to earn Columbia $11-million at the box-office. It might've done better but it opened relatively quietly as the studio didn’t quite embrace this type of film the way their rivals at Paramount did. Also of note, it would be the last film to use Columbia’s torch-bearing lady as a logo, as it opens on her but then zooms in to reveal the studio’s brand new blue sunburst logo. (The studio would later come to its senses and revert back to the classic design by 1992.)

Critical response was mostly negative. It was Siskel’s Dog of the Week on Sneak Previews (S.5, E30. 1981), calling it “a disgusting, needlessly gruesome film filled with stabbings, slashings, brain operations, and people being skewered like shish kebabs. Seeing it was a total waste of time, and it was one birthday party where I wanted to make a wish and blow out the projector.”

Critic Linda Gross had similar sentiments (The Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1981), saying, “Happy Birthday to Me is gratuitously mean. The ensemble acting is effective but individual scenes are marked by people called upon to display bizarre behavior and nasty tricks. Audiences are also subjected to many atrocities. In addition to the sadistic killings, the script assaults and manipulates the audience by delivering grisly effects and macabre ingenuity rather than providing the requisite narrative glue. And in the worst tradition of cheap horror thrillers, the film’s ending is grotesque. It’s a worked-over Hitchcock / O. Henry twist, a trick ending that doesn’t even deliver a sense of relief. This is one case of screen amnesia the reviewer would fervently have liked to share with the character.”

Meanwhile, “This aimless and ultimately desperate picture will have moderate box-office success, even though by this genre’s own gruesome standards, it’s pretty dull,” said William Whitaker (Abilene Reporter-News, May 17, 1981) “Only the ending -- one of those taking place in a rain-swept graveyard and around candle-lit mansions or gloomy, old houses -- causes any excitement in Happy Birthday to Me. Unfortunately, even this is marred by the incredulous and confusing explanation.”

Jack Mathews’ review (The Detroit Free Press, May 19, 1981) starts with a quote from director Thompson: “'Hitchcock believed that to generate suspense, you had to cheat a little.' He saw the director as kind of an illusionist.” Mathews then took this notion to the woodshed from there, calling the film, “A psychological horror movie that keeps its audience off guard with cheap deceit rather than any tricky mirrors. If Hitchcock’s illogical plot twists were a teensy bit unfair, Thompson’s are downright criminal. When the murderer in Happy Birthday to Me is finally revealed, it comes as a surprise not because you have been cleverly manipulated, but because you have not been given a single clue. Thompson, a veteran director whose credits include The Guns of Navarone and The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, has created what amounts to a technically slick version of Friday the 13th. It is shock for shock’s sake without an ounce of wit to go with it. Hitchcock would not have been proud.”

Others disagreed, including Skip Sheffield (Boca Raton News, May 19, 1981). “Happy Birthday to Me is being advertised as a typical teenage mayhem flick, but it's actually slightly more complicated," said Sheffield. "The plot (yes, it actually has a plot) has enough twists to keep teenage sleuths satisfied, while the film is peppered with adequate amounts of macabre humor.” And, “Despite lapses in logic and believability (the real killer is extraordinarily ingenious), the film does have a few legitimate jolts, mind-teasing plot bends, and enough gushes of blood to keep Karo Syrup stock high for weeks.”

Also, “In terms of shocks and gore, this is a two Alka Seltzer movie,” said Candace Russell (Fort Lauderdale News, May 19, 1981), in what felt like a preamble for another critical shellacking. However, her tone quickly changed. Said Russell, “The horror movie tree doesn’t bear any original fruit these days. The most that can be expected is a clever reworking of the old recipe for maximum scares or a novel means of bumping off innocent kids. Happy Birthday to Me has both. The film is a more-than-competently-made chiller about the peculiar goings-on at a coed prep-school. That’s to be expected inasmuch as the director is J. Lee Thompson, the veteran behind the spooky Cape Fear.” Here, “Thompson plays out the scenes where we anticipate mayhem like a virtuoso violinist. The script by Saxton, Jobin and Bond has a fair number of red herrings, a favorite Hitchcock touch. They serve to deflect attention and baffle the viewer, who may change his opinion of the killer’s identity four or five times. What’s guaranteed is that there is no means of figuring out the truth until it is revealed.”

Others reviews were also kinder, but ultimately in a more 'damning with faint praise' sense that usually went something like this: “It’s too bad they try to sell this movie on gore, since they could sell it on intrigue,” said Roger Caitlin (The Omaha World Herald, May 31, 1981). “The shish kebab is an odd way to die, I suppose. But most of the killings here are of the conventional stab-and-slash variety -- none of the gory, special effect inventiveness of the original Friday the 13th you might expect.” However, “In nearly every other teenage murder film these days, the murderer is identified in the first scene and the only suspense is in guessing the final death toll. Here, the filmmakers have crafted a whodunit.” And yet, “This is still a pretty awful film, and the suspense lags so much in the middle that it almost comes to a dead halt. But it builds to a climax that is so twisted, it's almost entertaining. It might even be a schlock classic if it weren’t so far-fetched.” 

At the time of its release, as part of the second wave of Slasher movies, Happy Birthday to Me was also a recipient of the burgeoning backlash toward these types of teenage body count films, which probably reached its frenzied climax with the release of Charles E. Sellier’s Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), which was picketed out of theaters for its alleged ruination of Christmas by depicting a killer Santa Claus. But even two years prior to that, people were starting to ask, Why are we watching these things? And what is the motivation of those who make and market them?

San Francisco Examiner (Nov. 11 & Dec. 16, 1984).

In her review of Happy Birthday to Me, Gross pointed out, “The skills of a strong director are worse than wasted in this kind of grueling, nonstop murder movie because the director is able to imply sinister relationships and evil goings on which never get a chance to develop, while the viewer is made to identify and feel violated by this unending violence.

“In these crazed murderer-on-the-rampage movies, the killer’s motive for mass murder and torture is usually revenge -- for either a real or imagined slight -- to be committed by a seemingly benign character who has nourished the grievance to psychotic proportions,” said Gross. “The same theme recurs in all these movies -- innocent young people are murdered because they are judged guilty and condemned for events over which they have no control. The real-life parallel would be the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends. All of these recent bloody movies operate on a similar premise and the connection seems more insidious than far-fetched. Ergo, in the glut of these films, it would seem we are killing our children for the love of a buck and a good scare.”

In her take on the blood and guts genre (Cinema Canada, July, 1980), Anne Reiter declared, “It’s a continent wide ‘phenomenon,’ if the term can be so employed: the target audience as target. Movie producers are convinced that North American teenagers derive some kind of vicarious thrill from watching their film counterparts kill and dismember one another, and the box office returns back them up. Whereas the horror genre was once synonymous with low budgets and small-time independent producers, it now ranks as one of the industry’s most lucrative sectors -- an apparent sure bet in a business that runs on risk. Gore has gone legit; it’s big time now, replete with expensive ad campaigns, massive budgets, and major studio backing.

“There are red herrings galore (in Happy Birthday to Me), an overabundance of gratuitous gore, and all the wit and grace of an afternoon at the abattoir,” bemoaned Reiter. “Except that no one really suffers here; death in this movie is as casual as conversation, devoid of any purpose other than the obvious. And it's working. Kids are forking over $4.50 a piece to scream and bounce in their seats, even if the whole thing’s a massive dose of deja vu. Happy Birthday to Me’s script has been shot at least six times over in the last few years under different titles, and the budget’s gone up every time. And the more money they spend, it seems, the less imagination they bring to the package. This film has no tongue in its sallow cheek; as if to justify the expenditure. Canadian horror flicks have lost the crazy edge they used to have. The scariest thing about all these [Slasher films] is their deadly dullness; the fact that they account for so large a percentage of this country’s total product is enough to give you the creeps.”

As to why I like to watch this type of Slasher / Body Count film so much is threefold. First is the thrills and chills the film will hopefully provide; second, to see what new and inventive ways the filmmakers and FX crew manage to dispatch their latest batch of victims; and third, but most important of all, to see how the mystery untangles itself and what twisted motives the killer spews when they're finally revealed.

The official rules of the Slasher movie were just starting to take shape by 1981 but weren't set in stone just yet; and it should be noted that this film actually established a few of these rules. And while it contains and delivers on all of those ingredients I mentioned, I find this film confounding on nearly all fronts. But my biggest beef with Happy Birthday to Me is that it’s just too damned long for this type of film.

Detroit Free Press (May 19, 1981). 

Clocking in at nearly two hours, when you factor in the final twist / reveal, you can’t help but feel that Happy Birthday to Me has wasted your time for the last 107-minutes of the film’s 110-minute total run time. Thus, as presented and ultimately wrapped-up, there's way too much time spent between the killings, where nothing significant happens. We trudge through muddled flashback after flashback, which is then compounded further when they all prove irrelevant in the end, and get slapped in the face with several red-herrings. But it’s all meaningless as the mystery drags you along before the ‘shock for shock’s sake’ ending, making this one an overall frustrating pill to swallow.

Thus, my beef isn’t really with the twist itself, it’s with everything that led up to it. Yes, the revelation that Ann was behind it all along makes absolutely no sense. None. And it makes even less sense the more you think about it. However, without this nonsensical twist, we wouldn’t have gotten that ending with the innocent Virginia basically railroaded up shit-creek on multiple counts of murder without a paddle, mask or no mask. I’m just saying, all of this might’ve been easier to swallow if everything else had been paired down to around 85-90-minutes.

And all of that resulting miasma has me conflicted on this film, as I’m not sure if I love it or hate it. And whether I love it more or hate it more kinda depends on the day or what aspect of it we’re talking about. And honestly, ‘hate’ is way too strong a word, here.

The whole film has a very serene, almost dreamlike quality about it, lush and vibrant, which, while nice to look at, makes the film’s pace seem even more glacial between the murders. And there's the rub. Their film is high on mood, atmosphere, and suspense, but, in the end, it just can't sustain this because it collapses under its own weight due to its length, which is then compounded further by what turned out to be a misleading backstory. The killings themselves are handled effectively with enough grue getting by the censors, but Virginia’s flashbacks with her mother are handled with 10-pound hams mounted on both of Thompson’s fists.

Despite this love / hate relationship, I still hold out hopes of seeing Happy Birthday to Me in its original, uncensored state. Now some forty years later, I have no idea if that will ever happen, though. Kino Lorber recently released a Special Edition Blu-ray of the film in 2022 that did not include these missing scenes. And if those guys couldn’t get it restored, I have my doubts if anyone ever will. I will also add my own little warning that I listened to the audio commentary on this release by moderator Daniel Kremmer and co-screenwriter Timothy Bond so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.

To me, there is nothing more disappointing or aggravating about a commentary than a moderator who obviously didn’t do their homework. In the first five minutes, they established Bond “had fun” working on the script but wasn’t present on set, at all, for any of the actual shooting, meaning he really had nothing else to add. And so, from there, Kremmer and Bond talk about their own careers, with an embarrassing amount of name-dropping, essentially talking about everything else BUT the film they were actually watching and were supposed to be commenting on.

As they wrapped it up, Kremmer had no doubt everyone had given up and shut them off long before then, but I slogged through to the very end to bring you this warning: Unless you want to hear time-killing third hand anecdotes about David Lean commenting on women’s vaginas during the making of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) while waiting for the clouds to move out of frame, to get the sun just right, which was a lone highlight but a lot less interesting than it sounds as told by these two, trust me, feel free to skip it. 

Now, despite all the grumping and bitching, I’ll freely admit I do like this film. I just find it frustrating and feel they kinda blew it with the climax. No one would believe Virginia’s claims of possession any more than they would’ve believed she was acting in self-defense and Ann framed her, given the same circumstances. 

A shock for shock’s sake ending seldom works out, whether they made any damned sense or not. And thus, for better or worse, Dunning and Thompson’s fateful decision to punch-up their climax will forever be Happy Birthday to Me’s cross to bear -- and no amount of wishing will ever make it go away.

Originally posted on February 8, 2002, at 3B Theater.

Happy Birthday to Me (1981) Famous Players :: The Birthday Film Company :: Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC) :: Columbia Pictures / P: John Dunning, Andre Link / AP: Larry Nesis / LP: Stewart Harding / D: J. Lee Thompson / S: John Saxton, Peter Jobin, Timothy Bond / C: Miklos Lente / E: Debra Karen / M: Bo Harwood, Lance Rubin / S: Melissa Sue Anderson, Glenn Ford, Tracey Bregman, Jack Blum, Matt Craven, Lisa Langlois, Lenore Zann, David Eisner, Michel-René Labelle, Richard Rebiere, Lesleh Donaldson as Bernadette O'Hara, Lawrence Dane, Sharon Acker, Frances Hyland