Happy Birthday To Me stars one of the most popular television actresses at the time, Melissa Sue Anderson of Little House on the Prairie.
Directed by J. Lee Thompson (1962's superlative Cape Fear) and produced by John Dunning and André Link, (producers of My Bloody Valentine), this Canadian horror has the familiar holiday theme like other films made at the same time, but a significantly more complicated plot.
Filmed in July 1980 and released to theaters in May 1981, Birthday boasts effective splat work by special effects master Tom Burman (including a skewered head, a nasty death-by-weightlifting and the infamous shishkebab throating).
Co-starring as Anderson's psychiatrist is screen vet Glenn Ford (1946's classic Gilda as well as 1953's stellar The Big Heat et al).
The Crawford Academy is a prestigious high school, which a group of inner circle students known as the "Top Ten" attend. One night, one of them, Bernadette (Lesleh Donaldson) is on her way to meet the others at the local pub called The Silent Woman.
She gets into her car and suddenly a figure with black gloves reaches over from the back seat and begins strangling her. She struggles, and thinking quickly, she plays dead.
The killer pauses, and Bernadette manages to escape. Running through the parking lot, she sees a familiar face and asks for help. But that person pulls out a blade and slashes her throat. At the pub, Virginia Wainwright (Melissa Sue Anderson) and her friends are behaving raucously.
They're kicked out and run to their cars where they challenge each other to a game of "chicken." This particular dare involves jumping over a raised drawbridge. Virginia flips out and storms out of the car. On her way home, she stops by her mother's grave.
When she gets home, her father Hal (Lawrence Dane), expresses his dissatisfaction with this. He tells her that she shouldn't go to the grave because it'll bring back memories of what happened.
Meanwhile, another student and admirer of Virginia, Etienne (Michel Rene LaBelle), has followed her home. She sees him looking at her through a window and screams, scaring him off.
The next day at school, Virginia (or Ginny as she's called), is in biology class watching a frog dissection. She has a flashback to her surgery, which occurred after the accident with her mother.
The operation involved brain cell regeneration. She tells this to Dr. David Faraday (Glenn Ford), who explains that she is regaining her memory. Outside the school, Etienne approaches her and shows her a pair of underwear he stole from her bedroom. Disgusted, she walks off.
Later, while fixing his motorcycle, Etienne is approached by a black-gloved stranger. The marauder puts the scarf that Etienne is wearing into the running motor and strangles him.
At the pub, the group is talking about Alfred (Jack Blum), the oddball member of the circle who goes around with his pet mouse. Virginia and Ann (Tracy Bregman), decide to sneak into Alfred's house. They find what at first appears to be Bernadette's head, but is in fact a replica that Alfred made.
Meanwhile, the body count is getting higher. Greg (Richard Rebiere), is killed while working out with his weights.
It's obvious Greg knows the killer on a friendly basis, as the latter keeps adding more weights to the barbell...finally dropping an enormous weight on Greg's crotch. This causes him to drop the barbell on his neck, sending his blood splattering everywhere. Now that's 'spotting'!
Rudi (David Eisner), another member of the Ten, decides to take Ginny to the academy chapel. Up in the bell tower, he is playing around with her. He pulls out a knife and threatens her.
A priest who enters the chapel below finds blood. The blood apparently belongs to Rudi, because Ginny shows up at the hospital to see her doctor.
There, she has another flashback to her operation. In a particularly graphic scene, she remembers the surgeons making the incision in her skull to perform the brain operation.
Rudi turns up at school, after having played a practical joke on everyone by disappearing and burying a fake skull outside.
Alfred is not so lucky. While following Ginny, he is stabbed. The person holding the knife turns out to be Ginny.
Ginny's birthday is this coming weekend. Her father is going away on work related business, but promises to return for her party.
At the school dance, Ginny is acting in an aggressive manner. She asks Steve (Matt Craven), over to her house for a midnight snack. He takes her up on the offer and they go back to her place, where she cooks shishkebob in the fireplace.
As she's feeding him she suddenly thrusts the skewer in him mouth, killing him. Poor Steve gags to death on his own bloody dinner...
The next morning, Ann comes by to find out what happened with Steve. Ginny says she doesn't remember being with him. In the bathroom she goes into a trance remembering the accident again.
She recalls being in a car with her mother and crashing into the river. She was able to get out of the car, but her mother died.
Ginny goes over to the bathtub, where she finds Ann submerged in the water with her neck slit. When Dr. Faraday arrives at the house, Ginny tells him that she murdered Ann. But the body has disappeared. The doctor implores her to make the connection between her accident and the deaths of the six students.
Ginny remembers what happened before her car went into the water. It was her birthday and the six were invited to a celebration her mother planned for her.
None of them showed up, preferring instead to go to another party. It turns out that her mom was not a respected person in the community. She had a reputation as a "loose" woman and many in the town believed she married Ginny's father simply for his money.
Furious, she dragged Ginny to the other party, but was denied entry. It was a humiliating experience, which ended with her drinking and driving the car into the water.
After Ginny tells this story, she leaves the room. She returns and bludgeons the doctor. It's now after midnight, and her father does make it in time for her birthday.
But he finds a bloody mess instead. He goes out towards his wife's grave and finds that the body has been exhumed. Nearby is the house where his wife lived before she married him. When he gets there, he finds a gruesome sight.
The bodies of the murdered students and his wife are slumped in chairs around the dining room table. Ginny is bringing in a cake...and singing "Happy Birthday" to herself.
Overcome with tremendous grief, Ginny 's father becomes yet another victim for the maniacal young murderess. This done, she lifts the head off the table of someone who isn't dead. That person is revealed to be...the real Ginny.
As the two girls begin to struggle, the drugged Ginny rips off the mask of the murdering Ginny. The murderer has actually been Ann the entire time! Years before, Virginia's mother had an affair with a married man...Ann's father.
From that affair, Virginia was born. Ann reveals all this in the climactic ending, claiming that Virginia's illegitimate birth caused the demise of her family. In actuality, the two are half-sisters; Ann had murdered everyone in retaliation.
Using Virginia's weakened mental state, Ann had carefully placed all the blame on the poor birthday girl. In the chaos, Ann & Virginia struggle, ending with Virginia stabbing Ann to save herself.
A policeman enters the abandoned house and sees the carnage, the birthday cake, and Virginia standing there with a bloody knife...
Jason: Poor Mary Ingalls! I don't care how convoluted the ending of Birthday may be, it's still great and I'll always love it!
In addition to just digging translucent-eyed Melissa Sue Anderson, I also like the creative murders, the fairly strong production values on this one, and the characters are likable enough.
The overwrought ending birthday scene alone is worth the price of admission. Of course, it's all cliched (now) but nevertheless it's a lot of fun!
Hunter: The ending of this one has so many twists, it seems to be a more grisly version of a Scooby Doo episode. But it makes sense, and Melissa Sue Anderson is a fetching protagonist.
