Bloody Birthday

What is it about background piano music (even with slight off-key arrangements on occasion) set to a darkened melody as if meant for children while reading to them Grimm’s Fairy Tales that seems so haunting? The simple explanation of an eclipse is used as the device that seems to have instilled an evil in three children born at the same time during it. Ten years after birth we see an attractive couple making out in a cemetery; the guy is struck multiple times in the face/head with a shovel while the girl is hung by a rope until asphyxiation. They’re then buried by those responsible for their murders. This isn’t the end, but only the beginning.

Call it a slasher movie or another of the notorious “killer kids” subgenre popular with horror fans. The kids are psychopaths with no conscience or guilt. When they kill, there’s nothing that heavily convicts them of their crimes. Because the three kids are so bratty, unnerving, cold-blooded, and devoid of any awareness of the cruelty that results from their violent actions, I think that is where the success of Bloody Birthday lies.

There are some scenes that maybe at the time it was made wouldn’t be considered as shocking but today would appall. Like seeing one of the child killers aiming a gun at another child, a daughter leading her sheriff father out of their house so one of her cohorts could bludgeon him with a baseball bat (later pretending that it was an accidental trip over a misplaced skateboard down the steps), or trapping a fellow student (one of the leads targeted by them because he came upon them as they were staging the death of the girl’s father) in an old freezer left in a junk yard. The scene with the gun and the kid pointing at another child (later shrugging it off as a toy, but we see it is a loaded weapon that kills a teacher!), I can only imagine, would send cold chills down those parents who have lost their children to school shootings. I can’t imagine this would ever pass a screen test today unless viewed in a dramatic light that is used as a message against gun violence. But, yet, it was once used in a slasher drive-in entertainment movie during the era of Friday the 13^th. The shooting of the teacher (Susan Strasberg, as one of those stuffy, stern, austere types who is an anal control freak demanding her students to follow her instructions for proper etiquette and a strict disciplinarian), no matter how annoying and irksome she might be, certainly would have a difficult time passing censors. My how time passes and what seemed perhaps to be not all that big a deal in 1980 is a bellyful of wrong in 2014. I have to admit that seeing a boy struggling to free himself from a locked fridge in a junk yard wasn’t altogether entertaining. Is it disturbing? Some would probably just roll their eyes at it, but I must admit that it was unsettling to me.  The kid’s breathing hard and the influx of terror that could be felt in him I could only imagine was probably scary at the time it would have been seen on VHS (I have read conflicting sources that say the film was put on the shelf while I read elsewhere that it was released theatrically).

The sun and the moon were blocking Saturn so these bad seeds have “something missing from their personality” according to lead final girl, Lori Lethin, studying astrology for a school project (she swoons for her science teacher, played by pre-Jake and the Fatman, Joe Penny). The convenience of Lethin’s study of astrology is purposely put in the film thanks to a screenplay that goes out of its way to explain why exactly the kids are so warped. Supposedly, Saturn controls the emotion and the way that you treat people. Yeah.

 

Of the three kid killers, Billy Jayne (of Just One of the Guys) seems to get a lot of the love. He has this smirk that you just want slap off his face. He likes to shoot people. He shoots Strasberg while she’s cleaning a cup in the sink after she scolds him for his “replica” gun, threatening to take his toy, not knowing it was the sheriff’s (confiscated by him while his widow is sleeping) prior to his “skateboard accident”. He also fails to shoot Lethin and her kid bro when a van’s lights shine towards him. Inside the van is another attractive teen couple preparing to shag, interrupting them by shooting both of them. Another kid who tosses rocks at the three child killers is nearly strangled by them with a water hose. In the climax, the trio decide it’s time to put an end to Lethin and her brother (played by KC Martel), with Jayne shooting at them with the cop gun. Andrew Freeman is the kid who gets the shaft among the three killers. He’s kind of the blond follower of the trio, helping Jayne and Elizabeth Hoy (every bit the pig-tailed princess feigning the sweetheart while present in front of her mom or needing to convince adults that she’s a “good, lil girl”; the very kind Patty McCormick made famous in ’56) clean up their messes or participate when needed. As a unit, they can be successful because adults just generally have a hard time believing these cute kids are actually homicidal monsters. They capitalize on those unaware of their psychopathy.

 

The screenplay obviously needs to provide us with someone able to see past what others are fooled by, so Lethin and Martel are chosen as the two fortunate enough to avoid the peril that befall others. When Jayne shoots at them, he always misses because that element of surprise is ruined and a clear target evades him. I can only imagine when Martel gets to deliver some nice punches to Jayne, many watching cheer and applaud. Still, Jayne sends off that same shit-eating grin when placed in the cop car to be taken off. Freeman gets put in a chest so that he can be no bother. Lucky for Hoy, however, she has mommy to whisk her away. We see at the end that even though her daughter promises for now on to be a good girl, she will continue to grow up a maniac (a mechanic was underpinned by a truck when she released his hydraulic press).

I first watched Blood Birthday on a Chiller Theatre program on a Fox channel affiliate late one Friday night. This was during the old days when I didn’t have cable at my house and had to turn the antennae just right as to pick up the signal. Of course, the film was cut, particularly the delicious nakedness of Julie Brown dancing a bit while her breasts were absent a bra. I can remember when the program would go to commercial, the voice would say, “We will return to Bloody Birthday, starring José Ferrer.” Ferrer was in the film maybe five minutes tops. He was the doctor who brought the three children from the womb to grace our world with their infamy.

To me, one of the enduring reasons behind why this film is a cult item is Hoy’s charging boys to peep on Brown undressing through a peep hole. There are two make-out sequences featuring blonde babes and their male suitors, all four at the wrong place, as the wrong time. Brown’s fate thanks to Hoy and her bow and arrow also might be considered one of the more memorable scenes in the film. I was surprised Bert Kramer is dispatched so early. He is the sheriff. I would have thought he might stick around for a while considering he was after the killer, with the irony of his very own daughter being responsible a token dramatic arc to use in the film. But his death bears greater emphasis on just how much of psychopath his daughter (and her male companions) really is. To convince daddy to follow his baby girl into the yard to later get his head caved in and not bat an eye tells us really early that all bets are off.

The violence is basically of the off-screen variety because showing explicit violence by kids to adults seems a bit too risqué even as the plot sickeningly suggests what these kid cretins are capable of doing to innocent people. That the kids are probably never to be punished for their crimes until reaching the appropriate age, we are left to wonder just how many more will be added to their body count. Hoy, it suggests, might leave a trail of dead behind her.

I have never watched a pristine copy of this film or even know if there is one available. I guess it is just as well. There's a part of me that likes to see a film look as if it was on a VHS tape tossed around in ransacked boxes, left to abandonment for a while, rescued from forgotten slumber after rummaging for something else, appears as if it plays on a barely-functioning VCR, and actually has the visual quality Grindhouse homages try so hard to mimic and represent. Bloody Birthday, with its open willingness to offend and titillate, seems to fit that bill, deserving to look ugly.