Just a few long weeks ago, I was writing about another Ed Hunt movie,
The Brain, on this blog. That movie, for all its many charms and delights, was not what any half-sane person would call plausible (not that I care anything about plausibility in art). Earlier in the decade, Hunt directed another horror film that was much more rooted in hard astrological fact -- in particular, the fact that a child who is born during a total eclipse when Saturn blocks the sun and moon will enter this world lacking a conscience.
Bloody Birthday's small California town
is astrologically mega-fucked because three children from three different families are born during one of these total eclipses we've been hearing so much about in recent paragraphs. The kids -- Debbie (Elizabeth Hoy), Curtis (Billy Jayne), and Steven (Andrew Freeman) -- are approaching their tenth birthday, and they decide to celebrate the occasion days before the big joint neighborhood birthday party by embarking on a murder spree, complete with a scrapbook commemorating the homicides. No one is safe from the tiny thrill killers, not even relatives or school chums. This birthday ... (David Caruso lowers shades) ... just got bloody (Roger Daltrey screams "yeahhhh!).
As the kids keep getting away with murder, school friend Timmy (K.C. Martel) and his older sister Joyce (Lori Lethin) become targets, Timmy because he witnesses the aftermath of one killing and Joyce just because. The bulk of the film's second half covers this conflict, with the siblings escaping death many times over.
Writer/director Hunt, who is working with a slightly larger budget than he had in
The Brain, turns the generic slasher film into a stranger, funnier thing by making a trio of goody-two-shoes children his killers, and the film never flags in its pacing and never gets dull. I particularly enjoyed a scene where the children attempted to hit Joyce with a car but one child had to work the pedals from the floorboard while the other drove, the driver inexplicably wearing a white bed sheet with eye holes cut out.
Bloody Birthday's cast is kind of a microcosm of '80s pop culture to come. The two top-billed actors, Jose Ferrer and Susan Strasberg, have the least amount of screen time, and it's clear the production only had enough money to pay them for a day or two of shooting. There seems to be little reason for Ferrer to be in the film, but Strasberg at least gets a few meaty scenes as the children's strict teacher. The larger roles were played by then-unknowns who went on to work in a lot of '80s television and horror movies. Debbie's older sister is played by Julie Brown, future MTV star (not to be confused with fellow '80s MTV VJ Downtown Julie Brown, catchphrase: "wubba wubba wubba"), Billy Jayne, who plays one of the killer kids, would later star in
The Beastmaster and
Cujo and the TV shows
Silver Spoons and
Parker Lewis Can't Lose. Martel played one of the children in
The Amityville Horror a few years before
Bloody Birthday but is probably best known for his role in
E.T. and his recurring part on
Growing Pains. Lethin appeared in two more cult '80s horror films,
The Prey and
Return to Horror High. Joe Penny, who has a small part as another teacher at the school, went on to play Jake in
Jake and the Fatman. (Also check out the posters in Julie Brown's bedroom: Blondie, Van Halen, Ted Nugent, Erik Estrada, and
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the blend of which kind of makes up the tone of this film).
Bloody Birthday is a solid, reliable '80s horror film that won't blow your mind but is a fine piece of violent entertainment. I would be remiss if I did not point out one of the most amazing things about this movie, even though it only lasts a second or two: the world's sleaziest children's party clown. Please enjoy his picture below. I've already created an elaborate back story for him in my mind.
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