Happy Birthday to ME?

In belated dishonor of my birthday, a gift for you goober gobbling cretins, a review for the classic 80's stalk and slash HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

Happy Birthday To Me is a riddle with no real answer.  The film makers present a mystery to the audience but there is no real way for the viewer to connect the dots in the story or guess who the culprit is that’s slaying the “in crowd” of the posh and privileged Crawford Academy, so don’t try.  Don’t use your grey matter; revel in the visceral delights and scares of the slasher film, but don’t play a guessing game with the movie.  You will lose, loser.  We are merely expected to ride the film to the end and find out through a twisted Scooby-Do like reveal who the killer in the film is.  Ignore the red herring-a-thon as well.  They’re just there to tease you.  Just pay attention to all those matching blue scarves.  Let yourself be drawn into the awe of the movie’s one special effect; a lightning bolt.  ZAAP!  Woah.     

The “in crowd” that find themselves the target of the killer in the film are a bunch of snotty brats and ego stroking donkey dicks.  And they threw a rat in a beer!  Blasphemy; ruining the golden nectar of the gods with rodent flesh; that wasn’t a Guinness assholios!  They also like to dangerously drive drunk over separating bridges, and generally place social status above all other qualities in a person.  If this film had one ongoing theme it’s that the pursuit of social status as an empty, and sometimes dreadfully harmful endeavor.      

These “in-crowd people choose to define themselves by the reaction other people have to them.  This is a common folly as people, like most animals, are fickle, simple minded, selfish creatures likely to form snap opinions of others based on irrelevant and often filtered information, thus rendering the benchmark of social standing useless at best.  That’s why I prefer to be defined by the Cat-fish man monster from ZAAT.  Social standing and the quest for popularity is a pursuit that the sociopath excels at and the foolish abide by.  The tragedy that unfolds for the main characters alive by the end of the film is something that could have been avoided had these people not placed such importance on how popular they are, or what kind of clique they fall into.

Happy Birthday To Me is a film with all the classic slasher trappings.  Scenes in the film were shot on Phoneix Bridge, giving you Upstate NY’ers another reason to check it out, so pretend it’s your putrid spawn day and party it up with a deadly double dose of Happy Birthday To Me.

Have yourself a BLACK CHRISTMAS!

Silent Night, Deadly Night 3

Silent Night, Deadly Night part 3 sadly ends the Santa slaying saga of Billy and Ricky. Ricky’s all pooped out from his hysterical “garbage day” massacre and finds himself sitting in coma with his brain in a Tupperware container while playing guinea pig to a mad scientist with a hard on for ESP. Of all the people to choose to give *telepathetical powers the genius in charge chooses a psychotic serial killer. Well played kind of, sort of mad scientist guy!

Soon enough Ricky is ESP broadcasting his holiday hang-ups to anybody willing to tune in, and tune in someone does. A blind chick with natural psychic abilities gets a full facial of Ricky’s heebie jeebies, a psychic link is made, and Ricky wakes up from his comatose on Christmas Eve in time to kill off a drunken Santa by his hospital bed.

Someone keeps pumping the brakes on this movie. The trash train begins rolling, Ricky begins to methodically make his way to the blind chick’s grandma’s house, people take cat naps, there’s some mildly amusing banter about car phones, some mildly amusing if not sappy brother/sister dialogue, and some mildly amusing shots of a guy with his brain in a plastic container hitch hiking and killing folks, but it’s all kind of vanilla. Someone pass the Dr. Pepper, this Christmas party needs a jolt! Even when people die they don’t look as surprised as they are relieved that something exciting happened to them. If the first entry was an all out dash for sleaze greatness this was the puttering sleepwalk through the finish line. It’s nothing to hoot about, then again it does have a killer with a brain dome, a blind psychic that spends all her time listening to The Terror on television, Canadian tuxedos, and actresses that look too much alike, so it’s worth giving a spin on a lazy Sunday, especially if you’re a fan of the first couple entries. On a Christmas pastry scale, this ranks somewhere next to fruit cake.

Silent Night Deadly Night 4

Silent Night, Deadly Night part 4 is a completely batshit crazy departure from the previous entries. It takes place during Christmas but really has little to do with the holiday itself. Rather its main focus is on black magic, cock roaches, women liberation, cult ritual, and Clint Howard’s dildo helmet. Seriously.

I’ve watched this film twice and still haven’t really figured it out. It begins with a women spontaneously combusting from the waist down and throwing herself off of a building. Not bad. A female reporter who feels like she is being discriminated against in her office and home because of her gender and because of her Jewishness investigates the scene of the combustible woman. So far we’re on track. She runs into Clint Howard who shows her a giant insect larvae, then runs into a book store where an older woman comes on to her like a raging softball playing bull dyke and feeds her dried up dates. I’m getting dizzy. She picks up a book about magic from the book store and begins seeing cockroaches and spirals in her kitchen condiments. My head feels light. She goes out for a picnic with the book store owner and her pals and begins hallucinating about even more insects and spirals. My brain begins eating itself. She learns she is being recruited into a witch coven that wishes to free her from her worse fears, which would result in her being free of the male patriarchal order, but first she needs to ingest and puke up a giant cockroach, get fucked by Clint Howard’s dildo helmet, roll around a slimy meat locker while changing into a larvae creature, or suffer a fiery spontaneous body explosion from the waist down. Blood erupts from my ear drums in a crimson waterfall. This is either one of the most brilliant pieces of cinematic trash the world has ever seen or an exercise in completely senseless befuddlement. I can’t decide, my brain is still in a sloppy puddle of gray goo at my feet.

BLACK CHRISTMAS is really Bob Clark’s anti-Christmas movie because it is about abortion and murder during a time when people are in celebration of Jesus’ symbolic birth.  The abortion of Claire’s baby is really the utter destruction of Christmas cheer.  Maybe it’s Bob Clark’s way of saying “sorry for all the Christmas Story reruns on PBS”.        

----------------------------------------------------

Sorry about the lack of updates my miserable misfits of the video wasteland.  The cryptkeeper is enjoying his winter hibernation under the dark soil of Camp Blackfoot.....but in 2012 the bodies begin dropping again....the horror returns...you've been warned!

The Sleeper coming 1/31

VHS?  YES!  It will never die!