Bloody Birthday (1981)

The film arrived in 1981 hoping to ride the crest of the slasher wave created by such massive money spinners as Halloween and Friday the 13th. Bloody Birthday merged elements from mid 70’s smash The Omen with a cheesy slasher movie style with rather lamentable results.

The film begins with a chilling prelude set on the day of an eclipse on June 9th, 1970. Jose Ferrer is on screen as Dr Whathisname for precisely 20 seconds exclaiming, “It’s a boy, Mrs X”, “it’s a girl, Mrs Y”, and “It’s a boy, Mrs Z”, to delighted cooing mothers before time winds by. We arrive on the eve of the tenth Birthday of the very same three terrific kids born that fateful night.

The small town they reside in has been thrown into a flap due to a grisly double murder – a young couple bludgeoned to death as they made out in the local cemetery inside an unused grave! Soon it transpires that the three bright-eyed “eclipse” kids have gone terribly “bad” (it was a Saturn eclipse…geddit!?) and turned into raving psychos with an insatiable bloodlust – who, after that, cause a string of increasingly gruesome deaths and mayhem as they embark upon their dreadful path to doom and destruction.

The local sheriff and father of one of the three bad seeds is next to go – bashed to a pulp with a baseball bat and made to look like he slipped on a carelessly discarded skateboard! One by one, the town’s population is whittled down in number by the beastly children who hold the community in a vice-like grip of terror. Just when it looks as though the entire town is set to be wiped out by the devilish psycho-tots, one of the good kids and his elder sister discover the cause of the mayhem and set about putting a stop to it. However, time is running out as the killer kids have planned a birthday party the remaining townsfolk are set to attend, and they are making sure it will be a party the town will never forget!

Will these ghastly junior psychos succeed in carrying out their horrendous mass murdering plans and make the town pay for being more interested in the eclipse than their births all those years ago, or will Big Sis and the good kid manage to save the day?

Sadly this film which Producer Max Rosenberg designed to make millions at the box office as The Omen had done, is woefully inept and is about as frightening as a particularly treacly episode of The Little House on the Prairie. Try as though director Ed Hunt does to make his devil children appear suitably demonic and evil – somehow, it just doesn’t wash. The scares and tension factor is non-existent, while even the death scenes are amateurishly staged and unconvincing.

The film struggles with its woeful script, and the characters are merely cardboard victims to which the audience is totally indifferent. Though the film had the potential, as most bad Seed films do for a certain “cheesy charm”, it lacks both the character or the style and the cleverly embedded humour to make it work. It also lacks any semblance of horror, tension, or atmosphere, rendering it a rather flat experience.

Neither is it rotten enough (in a campy style) to have any pretensions as a minor cult classic nor is it gruesome or nasty enough or frightening enough to merit much attention as a typical nasty from the grisly late 70s, early 80s era. The acting is in keeping with a film of this nature, and Ed Hunt’s direction is dull at best as he displays not the slightest ability to create tension or, indeed, even effectively crude shock sequences. His music director mimics Manfredini’s Psycho-inspired score (for the millionth time), adding to the utterly stale and dull made-for-TV feel that this rather forgettable film suffers from.

It could have been a giggle, but sadly isn’t. Not one of the strongest of the Killer Kid movies by a long shot and is only recommended for horror fans who have the singularly unique capability of watching absolutely anything! Try watching the wonderfully warped Sleepaway Camp for a far more satisfying bad-seed experience, or watch The Bad Seed again.