Spoilers ahead.

I thought about this movie for a while. As it was from the 80s, we know the 80s made some great horrors. I wondered why this movie wasn’t talked about more. Then I watched it, and now I know.

In Happy Birthday To Me we mainly follow Ginny, a girl who is part of the ‘top ten’ of her school, an elite club that are all pretty up themselves to be honest. People in the top ten start getting murdered but of course they do not know this and only see them as missing. Ginny believes she may be killing them when she has blackouts because she had a procedure done on her when she was younger that she thinks messed her up a bit. There’s also the fact that her mother once invited the top ten members to Ginny’s birthday party and none of them showed which caused her mother to drive off a bridge killing herself but Ginny, who was also in the car, escaped.

But it turns out Ginny is not the murderer and in fact it is another girl called Ann. Apparently Ginny’s mother had an affair with Ann’s father. She has made it seem as if Ginny did all this but, in a surprise turn of events, Ginny actually ends up killing Ann before she is accidentally found at the crime scene by a cop who believes she is the murderer. It’s kind of sad really. Ginny has been messed about and bullied and not treated right her whole life and now she is going to be branded a murderer of all her closest friends when in actual fact she only killed like two people. Just brush that under the carpet, she’s the underdog alright!

But my biggest issue with this movie is it didn’t engage me. It wasn’t fun or exciting or remotely scary. And when Ann showed up I honestly had no clue who she even was. I still wasn’t too sure until I read the plot on Wikipedia and that is not what you want from a film.

It was an interesting concept but just poor execution. The fact that these kids just seemed to vanish and we didn’t really get any proper gorey death scenes was not fun and when you think Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street came out around the same time it’s mad to see how different this movie went with the same sort of slasher premise.

I’m glad I watched this film because I was getting bored of the same old 21st century drivel but that doesn’t mean it was an enjoyable experience or that I would watch it again. Instead I think I’ll stick to the old classics.

What did you think of Happy Birthday To Me?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding