BLOODY BIRTHDAY: Our Children, Our Executioners?

Slasher movies are essen­tially built on rep­e­ti­tion of the same basic ingre­di­ents: start with some nubile teens, throw in a killer, a dash of gore, per­haps a sur­prise reveal, rinse and repeat.  The slasher entries that stood out from the pack did so because they found a new slant on these ele­ments or per­haps an idea lifted from a dif­fer­ent style of hor­ror to add a lit­tle spice to the for­mula.  A great exam­ple of this tech­nique is Bloody Birthday, a fun flick that cross­breeds the basic slasher film ele­ments with the “killer kid” sub­genre of hor­ror to cre­ate a dis­tinctly unwhole­some vari­a­tion of the knife-kill trend.

Bloody Birthday begins with a guest star and a freak astro­nom­i­cal occur­rence: Jose Ferrer plays out his first appear­ance in a 2-scene cameo as a doc­tor who deliv­ers a trio of babies at the same time dur­ing a solar eclipse.  Ten years later, those babies have grown into three cheru­bic kids — ath­letic Steven (Andy Freeman), brainy Curtis (Billy Jacoby) and the sheriff’s daugh­ter, Debbie (Elizabeth Hoy).  The neigh­bor­hood is prepar­ing a triple-birthday cel­e­bra­tion for their upcom­ing birth­days, not know­ing a switch has flipped in the brains of these mop­pets — and they’ve begun to kill their neighbors.

The kids are devi­ously clever and socio­pathic so they cover their tracks pretty well as their ser­ial killing streak begins.  However, they slip up when they antag­o­nize class­mate Timmy (K.C. Martel).  His turns to his teenage sis­ter , astrol­ogy buff Joyce (Lori Lethin), for help and she real­izes that the kids may have been born with­out the abil­ity to feel for oth­ers because of the odd solar-eclipse cir­cum­stance of their birth.  Unfortunately, the mur­der­ous trio are wise to the would-be heroes and plot to take them out so they can con­tinue their pre­pu­bes­cent mur­der streak.

Slasher movies are a gen­er­ally unwhole­some mix­ture of blood and car­nal­ity but Bloody Birthday pushes things into red-alert ter­ri­tory by adding pre-teens into the mix and mak­ing them mur­der­ers.  What would be fairly con­ven­tional killings take on new lev­els of dis­com­fort and seed­i­ness when smil­ing kids right out of Central Casting are doing the deadly deeds.  Sure, the astro­log­i­cal plot con­ceit may be silly and the way the adults fail to catch strains plau­si­bil­ity — but it’s easy to for­get these prob­lems when kids are com­mit­ting cold-blooded mur­der on screen (in par­tic­u­lar, a scene of one kid shoot­ing his teacher car­ries an added chill in light of today’s school shootings).

The plot also explic­itly acknowl­edges that kids this age have started to get curi­ous about sex, embod­ied in a comedic yet dis­turb­ing way by a scene in which Debbie charges Steven and Curtis a quar­ter to peek at her sis­ter Beverly (Julie Brown) while she strips and dances to rock music in her room.  A sim­i­lar fris­son comes when Curtis sneaks up on a pair of teens in mid-coitus and shoots them down.  It plays out like a sur­re­al­is­tic reen­act­ment of a Son Of Sam mur­der with a lit­tle kid stand­ing in for David Berkowitz — and when Curtis pauses to leer at the naked girl before shoot­ing her with a grin, it’ll creep you out in the worst way.

Whether by design or not, the rest of Bloody Birthday rein­forces the shock of these ele­ments by plac­ing them in placid, clean-cut sur­round­ings.  The script takes place in the kind of squeaky-clean sub­urb you’ve seen in dozens of kid movies and Stephen Posey’s bright, col­or­ful cin­e­matog­ra­phy gives the pro­ceed­ings the cheer­ful look of an after-school spe­cial gone hor­ri­bly wrong.  Ed Hunt plays into that psy­chotic after-school spe­cial feel by back­ground­ing the clue­less or help­less adults — and the pres­ence of t.v. reg­u­lars like Ferrer and Susan Strasberg (fun as a bitchy teacher) is the icing on this poi­so­nous children’s birth­day cake.  Melinda Cordell also is wor­thy of note as Debbie’s mom — she comes unglued in a mem­o­rable way as her lit­tle girl starts bump­ing off the rest of the family.

On the lat­ter note, cast­ing agent Judith Holstra deserves a spe­cial round of applause for her work on Bloody Birthday.  Not only did she find good kid actors — always a chal­lenge — but the film’s cast is rounded out with peo­ple who would soon be stars, like Riptide star Joe Penny in a cameo as one of Joyce’s teach­ers and future American Ninja Michael Dudikoff as Beverly’s boyfriend.  Best of all, she got a pre-novelty music/television star­dom Julie Brown to sup­ply the oblig­a­tory nudity — and the scene where she strips to a sleazy rock tune has endeared itself to celebrity nudity col­lec­tors everywhere.

Finally, and most impor­tantly, the actors who play the cen­tral kids are great — Martel makes a believ­able kid-in-danger hero and Lethin, then a t.v. reg­u­lar, han­dles her final girl role with a sub­tle, like­ably unforced per­for­mance.  However, it’s the kid­die killers who rule the film: Hoy does a fan­tas­tic job of cap­tur­ing a par­tic­u­lar “pop­u­lar girl” style of mali­cious­ness and Jacoby takes the pre­co­cious kid arche­type into homi­ci­dal ter­ri­tory (his leer­ing grin makes him the scari­est of the mur­der­ers).  Freeman gets less to do as the jock of the group but he makes the most of his few moments, par­tic­u­larly a fun scene where he mocks Strasberg.

In short, Bloody Birthday remains one of the must-see slash­ers because it retains the power to dis­turb the viewer on mul­ti­ple lev­els — and it belongs on the shelf of any stalk & slash enthusiast.