Happy Birthday to Me

(1981) **1/2

Hey, check it out everyone. I'm this movie: "Tralalalalalala. Wait, what? The End."

Virginia is a recent inductee into the "Top Ten" at the Crawford Academy. They all occupy the front row in all of their classes. They are the captains of the sports teams. Nobody seems to mind it that they go into the downtown bar, at least until they get in a fight with the local Shriners. I mean, isn't this a high school? I think it is, but I'm not sure that's ever made clear, what with all the sanctioned underage drinking and cavorting, and let's face it, this was the 80's -- movie teens in the 80's were all played by actors in their thirties.

Anyhow, being in the Top Ten is a huge deal for Virginia, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that this is her first school term since recovering from a terrible emergency surgery. Everything looks peachy, until one by one, the Top Ten begin to disappear.

Virginia suffers from post-surgery blackouts and can never seem to remember where she was at the time of the disappearances. Also, the movie throws a ton of red herrings in our face. By the midpoint of the movie, I found myself thinking, "Okay, maybe they didn't do it, but geez, what a collection of creepazoids."

The ending, when the movie finally wanders into one, smacks so heavily of "We'll decide when we get there," it plays like the movie wrote Cliffs Notes to itself. It's a bizarre little scenario, that last scene, but it loses all of its zip the moment the killer launches into the how-it-all went down speech. There's more electricity in the average Scooby-Doo denoument than there is here, dead bodies aside.

At least it's got some pretty good gore. Someone suffers a nasty neck gash by a straight razor. Another gets skewered with a, well, a skewer. Sadly, the more complicated murder scenarios cut to the splatter at the moment of truth.

This had serious pacing problems and lost tons of style points with every successive paragraph in a needlessly talky finish.