Sometimes you have to celebrate your birthday alone because you've gone on a homicidal rampage and repressed memories of the killings. This is the predicament presented in 1981's Happy Birthday to Me. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, the beginning of the film nicely builds tension and there are some genuinely exciting scenes with effective dark humour. Unfortunately, the film suffered from some very obvious late stage rewrites that gave it a ridiculously arbitrary conclusion.
Melissa Sue Anderson of Little House on the Prairie fame plays Virginia, a student at a high school where for some reason everyone wears the same purple striped scarf.
I guess it's a kind of school uniform.
There's a really nice drag race sequence in which Virginia and her teen friends drive over a raising drawbridge.
The film proceeds as you would expect a slasher movie to do. The characters get picked off one at a time. For some novelty, Glenn Ford shows up to help Victoria deal with the fact that she's starting to get repressed memories back from before she had brain surgery. The film builds to an obvious conclusion producers evidently were embarrassed to realise was too obvious. So to avoid the dreadful fate of having an audience predict the ending, they changed it to something that didn't make any sense. It's kind of funny, though. The final scene pretty much becomes a straight up comedy. At least I left with a smile.
X Sonnet #1842
In silhouette, the nose bespoke a knight.
A danger lurked around the shady town.
But fear rebounds and fills the vicious night.
A fool for just a day assumes the crown.
The busy sax was lost to lands of dream.
No questions burned the roasted chicken feast.
A star was born above the sunless beam.
A beauty mixed a boozy liquid beast.
The infant ball suspends the watching crowd.
Parades were made to house a raucous mind.
But answers never changed to sate a cloud.
And pulp'll never cut away the rind.
Dessert's a thought designed to please the folks.
A moral egg contains a thousand yolks.
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