On this Best Day Ever, we kick off The Deadly Doll's House's First (Maybe) Annual February of the Vertically Challenged Villains with...
As I crash into the final year of my twenties, it dawns on my Aquarian mind that there’s really only one way to celebrate my birthday: call my fellow February 1st buddies (Michael C. Hall, Pauly Shore) and have a weeklong murder spree, documenting all our kills-that-look-nothing-like-accidents-until-we-tell-the-world-they-were-accidents-and-they’ll-totally-believe-us in a baby blue scrapbook and bam! 29.
When, dear readers, was the last time you watched Bloody Birthday? If a slowly stretching smile isn’t painting your face at the very mention of Debbie, Curtis, and Steven, then the answer is simply, too long.
Quick Plot: In the small town of Meadowvale, three babies are born in the midst of a lunar eclipse. This causes them to grow up into bloodthirsty sociopaths, coming into their full ambitious evil on their tenth birthday.
Really, there’s not much more you need to know about Bloody Birthday. The fact that no mention is made of the millions of other babies born during the two minute eclipse across the world, who presumably did NOT turn into mini Henry Lee Lucases (because otherwise, there would be NO SURVIVORS LEFT ON THE PLANET) is simply fine. That these children are able to successfully call bizarre death after bizarre death an ‘accident’ is like a cupcake.
There’s a small attempt to create some kind of plot in the form of Joyce and Timmy, a brother/sister team who are somehow the only townspeople with a pea of a brain to suspect the trio of KILLING EVERYTHING IN THEIR PATH. Young Italian stallion-in-the-making Timmy has some inkling because a) they lock him in a junkyard refrigerator during an innocent round of playtime b) he spots them smiling over Debbie’s dead dad with a bloody baseball bat and c) Curtis (future Parker Lewis Can’t Lose best pal and Just One of the Guys little brother Billy Jayne) keeps threatening to shoot him. As in, every single time they run into each other on the street, Curtis threatens to shoot him.
Yeah, nothing suspicious about that.
But nobody really thinks of the sweet big sis (with dreams of being an uneducated reporter) when they think back on Bloody Birthday. It’s the soon-to-be ten-year-olds that make us grin, or, for some, the OTHER big sis’s daily stripteases performed in front of her mirror, feather boa in place and red bra (allllllllways a red bra) quickly removed.
A fact that I just realized: Nympho big sis is played by Earth Girls Are Easy’s Julie Brown, that sparky redhead (sometimes) who had what, to my 7-year-old mind, was an absolutely hilarious variety show on MTV back in the late 80s.
Well that made MY day, and I haven’t even been sung to yet!
There’s also a fatal graveyard makeout and a don’t-come-a-knocking rocking van sex scene, ensuring anybody with an appreciation of the female form gets their fill. For those more like me (i.e., people who have their own boobs and prefer to watch children shooting arrows into eyeballs), there are plenty of arrows being shot into eyeballs.
In other words, everybody’s a winner.
High Points
Little Debbie might well be one of the most underrated shorties in horror. Played by Elizabeth Hoy like a softer Tracy Flick, she easily steals the film as the true sociopath amongst the gang, a pretty little girl who can turn on the tears or a sweet teacher-friendly smile just as easily as she can take out a bow and arrow and shoot her sister in the eyeball.
Shoot her sister. In. The. Eyeball.
Low Points
Oh fiddles. Are we really going to talk about the stupidity of every character that wasn’t born during the eclipse, the out-of-nowhere bloodthirst displayed by our leads, the utter sleaziness of every frame or--
Nah. None of that ever happened.
Lessons Learned
Homework is more important than a party. Keep telling yourself that, marked-for-death schoolteacher
1980s era blonds were allergic to bras
Self-respecting reporters don’t need to take no silly classes
Rent/Bury/Buy
Bloody Birthday is a special film, one made during an era where it was totally okay to have a little girl charging quarters for her sociopathic playmates to peep into her sister’s bedroom while the high school student dances naked. It’s the kind of film that has children shooting their fourth-grade teachers, beating parents to death with baseball bats, and burying horny teenagers alive. The style is sleazy. The classiness, nil.
If such a description doesn’t make you want to go to your local video store and score yourself a copy, then perhaps you should not have RSVP’d to my birthday party.
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