Bloody Birthday
Bloody Birthday is Heathers without a happy ending. It’s a movie about three psychopathic ten-year olds who go on a murder spree for no better reason than an eclipse that occurred when they were born. The eclipse supposedly made them evil; I don’t even care.
A couple, Annie and Duke, are murdered in a cemetery with a skipping rope. The killers leave the handle of the skipping rope at the crime scene, and thus the sheriff – Sheriff Brody no less – takes the skipping rope with him to an elementary school so he can ask some hard questions to some kids who goddamn well better have some answers. The three psychopathic ten-year-olds – Debby, Curtis, and Steven – are in the class. What role Brody thinks the skipping rope played in the murders, and thus whether or not one of the children killed the couple, is never specified because Brody doesn’t reconstruct the grisly murders for the children’s benefit.
After class Curtis and Timmy pay Debby a quarter each to watch Beverly strip in her bedroom to music widely abandoned for such purposes. Curtis pays another quarter to see her take off her panties, but I'm the one who feels cheated because I think Curtis sees more than I do and I paid ten bucks for this movie.
Beverly meets up with her friend Joyce for a walk to school. Beverly thinks the cemetery murders were "really creepy" without knowing something even creepier just happened to her.
And even creepier shit happens to Joyce in the form of her little brother Timmy. At the beginning of the movie he sneaks in the house through an open window at night and startles her. She wants to know what he was doing. He says he was feeding the dog, but she doesn’t believe him, and she will pester him about this throughout the movie until he finally admits that he is a customer of Debby’s peep-hole business – which is apparently open twenty-four hours.
Later in the movie Joyce’s boyfriend Paul sneaks in and makes a jackass of himself with a jump-scare. Before they have sex they stand in a hallway hugging and kissing. Timmy watches with a smile as wide as a Chelsea Grin. When Joyce notices Timmy, he says that their dad told him to watch out for her, which he apparently interpreted to mean "watch her have sex" and, by God, he could not be happier about that responsibility.
Debbie’s peep-hole business has seriously warped poor little Timmy.
After the peeping scene, Sheriff Brody goes home, where Debby lures him outside and throws the jump rope handle he was looking for on the ground. While he's enthralled with it Steven sneaks up behind him and beats him with a baseball bat like a rabid dog. The kids set him up on the stairs to make it look as if he had a nasty fall.
At Brody's funeral, Debby and the Little Raskolnikovs give each other looks that suggest Timmy will be the next to die.
The first attempt to murder Timmy is at a junkyard where he, Curtis, and an unnamed blond boy go to play hide-and-seek. Curtis pulls a gun on the blond boy and tells him not to copy his hiding spot, knowing that boy will find a hiding spot after that not even a cadaver dog could find him in. Then Curtis locks Timmy in a refrigerator but Timmy eventually gets out and tattles on Curtis to Joyce, who doesn't believe him because Timmy probably often gets himself locked in refrigerators, closets, parked cars, and other hiding spots close to somewhere he thinks Joyce might take off her clothes.
With Timmy presumed dead, Debby and the gang decide to kill Mrs. Davis, their teacher who wouldn't cancel homework even though they have a birthday party coming up. Since their birthday is in June, which means they're in summer school, I'm surprised the movie didn't bother to show me the three teachers they murdered earlier for flunking them. Debby has a picture of Mrs. Davis she puts in a scrapbook where she keeps news articles about all the murders, which is an important scrapbook for those who want to see Beverly murdered, but it spells doom for those who want to see her naked again.
The plot to kill Mrs. Davis is never explained but carried out in the following scenes. Curtis comes over to Debby's house late the next night and swaps a replica of a pistol for Sheriff Brody's real pistol.
Then Curtis finds Mrs. Davis the next day at school and pulls the gun on her. Mrs. Davis thinks it's a toy, and she tells Curtis that if he brings the replica to school again she'll take it away and he'll never get it back. She learns soon enough you can't take a real gun away from a ten-year old as easily as a replica.
He shoots Mrs. Davis and she slumps down on some paper towels. Joyce discovers her in a closet, where it went into instant rigor mortis and can stand on its own. Steven is in a cabinet with the gun when Joyce finds the body, which means there will be a pre-emptive assault on Joyce the kids have time to premeditate because Joyce has a firm faith in the county police, even without Sheriff Brody, who supposedly fell to his death on the steps in his front yard.
Joyce gets a ride form a deputy and finds a note from Timmy on the door that says he's playing in the junkyard again, although he had promised her he wouldn't after he almost died and rotted in a refrigerator. Timmy is not at the junkyard, instead he is visiting Debby at her treehouse. Debby wants to play "doctor"; but Timmy likes baseball: he doesn’t know that Debby and her kindergarten cop-killing friends like baseball even more. Debby almost pushes Timmy off the treehouse, but then stops when a phone rings. She could have pushed him over; even if he didn't die; it's unlikely he'd think she was trying to kill him since he couldn't put that together when he was locked in the refrigerator.
Meanwhile Joyce has gone to the junkyard to find Timmy and tell him his teacher was shot dead in the arts-and-craft room and interrogate him about whom he was peeping on when it happened. Steven and Curtis are in a car waiting for her. They try to run her down until Joyce falls and gets tangled in some wires, and then Curtis rigs the car to drive on its own with a brick on the gas pedal. But Joyce tricks the stampeding car into running off a hill after she jumps out of its way.
After a day like this Joyce settles down to read astrology signs to Timmy and let him guess whose horoscope she's reading. The subject of one profile is "totally confident and enormously seductive." I first thought this was Joyce's sign, but I was wrong: it's Beverly's. Timmy shouts "Yeah!" when Joyce tells him this, and considering the peeping-booth operation this should make Joyce concerned about how "enormously seductive" Beverly really is.
Meanwhile Curtis prowls the streets and almost shoots a boy playing in a backyard but changes his mind after the boy's father yells from inside. Then he finds a couple having sex in the back of a white van like the ones that became unpopular after Unsolved Mysteries showed them abducting child actors like the one playing Curtis. A brief sex scene follows that some people consider "gratuitous" without realizing a slasher movie can no more have gratuitous sex scenes than a porn can have a gratuitous plot.
As the couple make out in the back, Curtis leaps on the hood, then he bungles around outside until the couple hears him and the girl has the boy investigate. He doesn’t see anything and they resume making love for a short time until they are startled by a noise again. When the boy opens the back doors Curtis shoots him in the head and then shoots the woman twice. It is no wonder Curtis is already desensitized to sex: he has seen Beverly strip buck naked an untold number of times and, depending on how well Debby knew her schedule, a number of other things besides.
I'd been wondering for some time if Joyce was ever going to tell Beverly about that peep hole, and she does the next day at the birthday party. She also tells Joyce about the financial as opposed to incestuous reasons for the hole's existence, leaving it to Beverly to discover in her heart which is worse.
Meanwhile Debby tells Curtis that Joyce "knows and she's not gonna keep quiet", so Curtis devises a swindle that will make Joyce appear crazy to the other adults. He adds more icing to some of the cakes while holding a bottle of ant poison behind his back. Joyce interrupts him and is displeased with the depreciated aesthetic value of the cakes now that Curtis has disrupted the color scheme. When Curtis drops the bottle of poison she asks him what he did, which is a stupid, time-wasting question because the cake isn't crawling with ants.
Joyce runs through the party slapping cake out of people’s hands. When she accuses Curtis of poisoning it, he retorts that he was keeping the poison away from the cakes. The adults believe him, and the party resumes with uninhibited cake consumption.
It is rumored that all of the cake was eaten; but Joyce would not believe it.
Beverly becomes a bigger problem than Joyce when she discovers Debby's murder- scrapbook. Beverly shows the scrapbook to Mrs. Brody, and when Mrs. Brody confronts Debby about it she says it belongs to Curtis. Curtis is banned again.
Depending on how you would tolerate a peep-hole in your bedroom with a quarter-a-peep business behind it, you may or may not have guessed how Beverly meets her demise. After Beverly burns the scrapbook in the fireplace and Debby unsuccessfully attempts to kill her with a fire poker, she calls over Curtis and Steven and hides in the closet with the peep-hole. Yes, it is still there, unblocked with boxes or patched up with plaster, and the only reasonable if also utterly disturbing explanation for this is that Beverly is getting some peep-hole kickback she doesn't have to report on her taxes.
Debby notches an arrow and then knocks on the wall beside the hole, and Beverly, with astonishing gullibility, investigates. It is not hard to conclude what the knocking may be, and from that conclusion it is not hard to anticipate that the closer she gets to the peep-hole, the more likely it is that something will come out of it. Debby shoots her in the eye and Beverly falls back dead. The arrow doesn't penetrate very far, but I'm inclined to believe annoying characters have eyes more vital than brains and give them a wide variety of mortal wounds.
Obviously Debby can't leave Beverly on the ground with an arrow sticking out of her eye, so Curtis and Steven arrive, wrap her dead body in a blanket, and drag her out to the trash like a dead dog. Mrs. Brody now has to go to therapy because her husband and daughter are dead.
With Beverly gone and Mrs. Brody in the hospital for therapy and a useless peephole making no money, Debby, Curtis, and Steven play hide-and-seek in the house until a kid throws rocks at a window from across the street. The rocks bounce off because the windows because the windows are bullet proof. They chase the boy down and try to strangle him with a garden hose, which cuts off the supply of water Joyce is using to water her yard. She stops them from killing him, but not without roughing up Curtis, who threatens her with assault charges. She threatens to tell the Sheriff in turn, and when Curtis mentions the birthday party incident Debby smiles at Joyce with a looks that says "Yeah bitch, what's up?" It’s the most adorable thing in the movie.
Debby is not about to let Joyce prevent another murder, so she sets out to murder Joyce right away by inviting her to babysit that night. And if she's going to kill Joyce she might as well kill Timmy. I was disappointed with the refrigerator set piece and looked forward to seeing Timmy die in a way that forces Joyce to try to resuscitate him with mouth-to-mouth.
Joyce agrees to babysit.
Although Joyce is stupid, she is impossible to kill. Steven almost shoots Joyce from outside until Curtis reminds him the windows are bullet-proof, so they go inside where Curtis almost shoots Joyce but Timmy warns her at the last second. Debby tries to strangle Timmy with the skipping-rope but Joyce throws a lamp at her that knocks her on her ass.
Joyce and Timmy try to escape, but Curtis rigged the security system to put the house on lockdown like a mansion in a Gothic novel. Debbie hides in a closet, then pounces on Joyce and tries to strangle her as she runs around the corner. Timmy kicks something on the ground that makes Debbie release Joyce, and I have tried but I cannot figure out exactly what Timmy kicked. Whatever it was I’m not giving Timmy credit for saving Joyce’s life because I’m fairly certain that I know what Timmy would want in return.
They go into Beverly’s bedroom where Curtis fires at them several more times, creating a heaven of peep holes all along the walls. Joyce tries to use the phone as Debbie gets in the closet with her bow and arrow. Debby shoots the arrow at Joyce but misses.
Steven comes in the bedroom armed with a kitchen knife, but Joyce splashes him with a fish bowl and then she and Timmy lock him in a trunk. The great thing about a movie with killer kids is that, regardless of how many people they kill or don’t kill, it’s always funny because they’re kids.
Joyce runs out of the bedroom and gets the replica out of the cabinet, an act that raises two questions: how she knew there was a gun there (did Sheriff Brody tell everyone where his gun was because his bullet-proof windows filled him with false bravado?), and why she hasn’t, after several shots, yet realized that Curtis stole it. Curtis comes in the living room and aims at the two of them with a smug grin. He has run out of bullets, however, so Timmy charges him and knocks him on the ground. Then Timmy and Joyce hog-tie him. I wonder what horseplay Timmy and Joyce were playing that involved learning how to hogtie people.
Debbie slips out the back door as Joyce beats the security-system control box with the replica, or maybe the real gun because I cannot tell the difference. Although it sparks and smokes, I am not sure breaking it would reset it and open the locked doors. She tells Timmy to “go to the Wilson’s house and call the police”.
Mrs. Brody arrives and Debbie runs towards the car. Debbie double-crosses again and blames the attempted murders on Curtis and Steven, an admission that at least means Debby knew Curtis and Steven were murderers but didn’t want to tell anyone about it until they started killing people at her house. The movie doesn’t show the conversation she had with Mrs. Brody that convinces her to drive away, and this is very disappointing because that conversation deserves to be studied. The police arrive as Mrs. Brody leaves. I wonder how large the police force is, since there hasn’t so far been a murder important enough to collect them all together in one place.
The next morning Curtis and Timmy are led away from the police station and put in the back on an unmarked car. It would look strange indeed to load two boys into the back of a regular cop car. I wonder what is going on. Are they being taken to a juvenile-detention center, or the regular jail? Are they out on bond? The legal fallout of this movie is more interesting to me than the murders. Two murderous ten-year olds, together with Debbie’s peep-hole operation, must make for some very sensational news coverage.
Mrs. Brody must be wanted as a person of interest if not an accomplice after the fact, since I will not be deluded that Curtis and Steven wouldn’t betray Debbie after she betrayed them. Debbie’s face would be all over the news. And there is no indication that Debbie will stop killing anytime soon.
Mrs. Brody changed Debbie’s name to Beth Simpson. Debbie promises to be a “good little girl”, but as Mrs. Brody drives away the camera shifts to a truck behind the gas station they were at. From what I can put together, Debbie killed the truck driver by releasing the pressure on his hydraulic jack while he changed a tire, thus crushing his head with the weight of the truck. I hope she manages to evade the police for years until she can join up again with the prison-hardened Curtis and Steven and begin another murder spree that starts with Timmy and Joyce.
Perhaps Bloody Birthday has a happy ending after all.
Bloody Birthday is Heathers without a happy ending. It’s a movie about three psychopathic ten-year olds who go on a murder spree for no better reason than an eclipse that occurred when they were born. The eclipse supposedly made them evil; I don’t even care.
A couple, Annie and Duke, are murdered in a cemetery with a skipping rope. The killers leave the handle of the skipping rope at the crime scene, and thus the sheriff – Sheriff Brody no less – takes the skipping rope with him to an elementary school so he can ask some hard questions to some kids who goddamn well better have some answers. The three psychopathic ten-year-olds – Debby, Curtis, and Steven – are in the class. What role Brody thinks the skipping rope played in the murders, and thus whether or not one of the children killed the couple, is never specified because Brody doesn’t reconstruct the grisly murders for the children’s benefit.
After class Curtis and Timmy pay Debby a quarter each to watch Beverly strip in her bedroom to music widely abandoned for such purposes. Curtis pays another quarter to see her take off her panties, but I'm the one who feels cheated because I think Curtis sees more than I do and I paid ten bucks for this movie.
Beverly meets up with her friend Joyce for a walk to school. Beverly thinks the cemetery murders were "really creepy" without knowing something even creepier just happened to her.
And even creepier shit happens to Joyce in the form of her little brother Timmy. At the beginning of the movie he sneaks in the house through an open window at night and startles her. She wants to know what he was doing. He says he was feeding the dog, but she doesn’t believe him, and she will pester him about this throughout the movie until he finally admits that he is a customer of Debby’s peep-hole business – which is apparently open twenty-four hours.
Later in the movie Joyce’s boyfriend Paul sneaks in and makes a jackass of himself with a jump-scare. Before they have sex they stand in a hallway hugging and kissing. Timmy watches with a smile as wide as a Chelsea Grin. When Joyce notices Timmy, he says that their dad told him to watch out for her, which he apparently interpreted to mean "watch her have sex" and, by God, he could not be happier about that responsibility.
Debbie’s peep-hole business has seriously warped poor little Timmy.
After the peeping scene, Sheriff Brody goes home, where Debby lures him outside and throws the jump rope handle he was looking for on the ground. While he's enthralled with it Steven sneaks up behind him and beats him with a baseball bat like a rabid dog. The kids set him up on the stairs to make it look as if he had a nasty fall.
At Brody's funeral, Debby and the Little Raskolnikovs give each other looks that suggest Timmy will be the next to die.
The first attempt to murder Timmy is at a junkyard where he, Curtis, and an unnamed blond boy go to play hide-and-seek. Curtis pulls a gun on the blond boy and tells him not to copy his hiding spot, knowing that boy will find a hiding spot after that not even a cadaver dog could find him in. Then Curtis locks Timmy in a refrigerator but Timmy eventually gets out and tattles on Curtis to Joyce, who doesn't believe him because Timmy probably often gets himself locked in refrigerators, closets, parked cars, and other hiding spots close to somewhere he thinks Joyce might take off her clothes.
With Timmy presumed dead, Debby and the gang decide to kill Mrs. Davis, their teacher who wouldn't cancel homework even though they have a birthday party coming up. Since their birthday is in June, which means they're in summer school, I'm surprised the movie didn't bother to show me the three teachers they murdered earlier for flunking them. Debby has a picture of Mrs. Davis she puts in a scrapbook where she keeps news articles about all the murders, which is an important scrapbook for those who want to see Beverly murdered, but it spells doom for those who want to see her naked again.
The plot to kill Mrs. Davis is never explained but carried out in the following scenes. Curtis comes over to Debby's house late the next night and swaps a replica of a pistol for Sheriff Brody's real pistol.
Then Curtis finds Mrs. Davis the next day at school and pulls the gun on her. Mrs. Davis thinks it's a toy, and she tells Curtis that if he brings the replica to school again she'll take it away and he'll never get it back. She learns soon enough you can't take a real gun away from a ten-year old as easily as a replica.
He shoots Mrs. Davis and she slumps down on some paper towels. Joyce discovers her in a closet, where it went into instant rigor mortis and can stand on its own. Steven is in a cabinet with the gun when Joyce finds the body, which means there will be a pre-emptive assault on Joyce the kids have time to premeditate because Joyce has a firm faith in the county police, even without Sheriff Brody, who supposedly fell to his death on the steps in his front yard.
Joyce gets a ride form a deputy and finds a note from Timmy on the door that says he's playing in the junkyard again, although he had promised her he wouldn't after he almost died and rotted in a refrigerator. Timmy is not at the junkyard, instead he is visiting Debby at her treehouse. Debby wants to play "doctor"; but Timmy likes baseball: he doesn’t know that Debby and her kindergarten cop-killing friends like baseball even more. Debby almost pushes Timmy off the treehouse, but then stops when a phone rings. She could have pushed him over; even if he didn't die; it's unlikely he'd think she was trying to kill him since he couldn't put that together when he was locked in the refrigerator.
Meanwhile Joyce has gone to the junkyard to find Timmy and tell him his teacher was shot dead in the arts-and-craft room and interrogate him about whom he was peeping on when it happened. Steven and Curtis are in a car waiting for her. They try to run her down until Joyce falls and gets tangled in some wires, and then Curtis rigs the car to drive on its own with a brick on the gas pedal. But Joyce tricks the stampeding car into running off a hill after she jumps out of its way.
After a day like this Joyce settles down to read astrology signs to Timmy and let him guess whose horoscope she's reading. The subject of one profile is "totally confident and enormously seductive." I first thought this was Joyce's sign, but I was wrong: it's Beverly's. Timmy shouts "Yeah!" when Joyce tells him this, and considering the peeping-booth operation this should make Joyce concerned about how "enormously seductive" Beverly really is.
Meanwhile Curtis prowls the streets and almost shoots a boy playing in a backyard but changes his mind after the boy's father yells from inside. Then he finds a couple having sex in the back of a white van like the ones that became unpopular after Unsolved Mysteries showed them abducting child actors like the one playing Curtis. A brief sex scene follows that some people consider "gratuitous" without realizing a slasher movie can no more have gratuitous sex scenes than a porn can have a gratuitous plot.
As the couple make out in the back, Curtis leaps on the hood, then he bungles around outside until the couple hears him and the girl has the boy investigate. He doesn’t see anything and they resume making love for a short time until they are startled by a noise again. When the boy opens the back doors Curtis shoots him in the head and then shoots the woman twice. It is no wonder Curtis is already desensitized to sex: he has seen Beverly strip buck naked an untold number of times and, depending on how well Debby knew her schedule, a number of other things besides.
I'd been wondering for some time if Joyce was ever going to tell Beverly about that peep hole, and she does the next day at the birthday party. She also tells Joyce about the financial as opposed to incestuous reasons for the hole's existence, leaving it to Beverly to discover in her heart which is worse.
Meanwhile Debby tells Curtis that Joyce "knows and she's not gonna keep quiet", so Curtis devises a swindle that will make Joyce appear crazy to the other adults. He adds more icing to some of the cakes while holding a bottle of ant poison behind his back. Joyce interrupts him and is displeased with the depreciated aesthetic value of the cakes now that Curtis has disrupted the color scheme. When Curtis drops the bottle of poison she asks him what he did, which is a stupid, time-wasting question because the cake isn't crawling with ants.
Joyce runs through the party slapping cake out of people’s hands. When she accuses Curtis of poisoning it, he retorts that he was keeping the poison away from the cakes. The adults believe him, and the party resumes with uninhibited cake consumption.
It is rumored that all of the cake was eaten; but Joyce would not believe it.
Beverly becomes a bigger problem than Joyce when she discovers Debby's murder- scrapbook. Beverly shows the scrapbook to Mrs. Brody, and when Mrs. Brody confronts Debby about it she says it belongs to Curtis. Curtis is banned again.
Depending on how you would tolerate a peep-hole in your bedroom with a quarter-a-peep business behind it, you may or may not have guessed how Beverly meets her demise. After Beverly burns the scrapbook in the fireplace and Debby unsuccessfully attempts to kill her with a fire poker, she calls over Curtis and Steven and hides in the closet with the peep-hole. Yes, it is still there, unblocked with boxes or patched up with plaster, and the only reasonable if also utterly disturbing explanation for this is that Beverly is getting some peep-hole kickback she doesn't have to report on her taxes.
Debby notches an arrow and then knocks on the wall beside the hole, and Beverly, with astonishing gullibility, investigates. It is not hard to conclude what the knocking may be, and from that conclusion it is not hard to anticipate that the closer she gets to the peep-hole, the more likely it is that something will come out of it. Debby shoots her in the eye and Beverly falls back dead. The arrow doesn't penetrate very far, but I'm inclined to believe annoying characters have eyes more vital than brains and give them a wide variety of mortal wounds.
Obviously Debby can't leave Beverly on the ground with an arrow sticking out of her eye, so Curtis and Steven arrive, wrap her dead body in a blanket, and drag her out to the trash like a dead dog. Mrs. Brody now has to go to therapy because her husband and daughter are dead.
With Beverly gone and Mrs. Brody in the hospital for therapy and a useless peephole making no money, Debby, Curtis, and Steven play hide-and-seek in the house until a kid throws rocks at a window from across the street. The rocks bounce off because the windows because the windows are bullet proof. They chase the boy down and try to strangle him with a garden hose, which cuts off the supply of water Joyce is using to water her yard. She stops them from killing him, but not without roughing up Curtis, who threatens her with assault charges. She threatens to tell the Sheriff in turn, and when Curtis mentions the birthday party incident Debby smiles at Joyce with a looks that says "Yeah bitch, what's up?" It’s the most adorable thing in the movie.
Debby is not about to let Joyce prevent another murder, so she sets out to murder Joyce right away by inviting her to babysit that night. And if she's going to kill Joyce she might as well kill Timmy. I was disappointed with the refrigerator set piece and looked forward to seeing Timmy die in a way that forces Joyce to try to resuscitate him with mouth-to-mouth.
Joyce agrees to babysit.
Although Joyce is stupid, she is impossible to kill. Steven almost shoots Joyce from outside until Curtis reminds him the windows are bullet-proof, so they go inside where Curtis almost shoots Joyce but Timmy warns her at the last second. Debby tries to strangle Timmy with the skipping-rope but Joyce throws a lamp at her that knocks her on her ass.
Joyce and Timmy try to escape, but Curtis rigged the security system to put the house on lockdown like a mansion in a Gothic novel. Debbie hides in a closet, then pounces on Joyce and tries to strangle her as she runs around the corner. Timmy kicks something on the ground that makes Debbie release Joyce, and I have tried but I cannot figure out exactly what Timmy kicked. Whatever it was I’m not giving Timmy credit for saving Joyce’s life because I’m fairly certain that I know what Timmy would want in return.
They go into Beverly’s bedroom where Curtis fires at them several more times, creating a heaven of peep holes all along the walls. Joyce tries to use the phone as Debbie gets in the closet with her bow and arrow. Debby shoots the arrow at Joyce but misses.
Steven comes in the bedroom armed with a kitchen knife, but Joyce splashes him with a fish bowl and then she and Timmy lock him in a trunk. The great thing about a movie with killer kids is that, regardless of how many people they kill or don’t kill, it’s always funny because they’re kids.
Joyce runs out of the bedroom and gets the replica out of the cabinet, an act that raises two questions: how she knew there was a gun there (did Sheriff Brody tell everyone where his gun was because his bullet-proof windows filled him with false bravado?), and why she hasn’t, after several shots, yet realized that Curtis stole it. Curtis comes in the living room and aims at the two of them with a smug grin. He has run out of bullets, however, so Timmy charges him and knocks him on the ground. Then Timmy and Joyce hog-tie him. I wonder what horseplay Timmy and Joyce were playing that involved learning how to hogtie people.
Debbie slips out the back door as Joyce beats the security-system control box with the replica, or maybe the real gun because I cannot tell the difference. Although it sparks and smokes, I am not sure breaking it would reset it and open the locked doors. She tells Timmy to “go to the Wilson’s house and call the police”.
Mrs. Brody arrives and Debbie runs towards the car. Debbie double-crosses again and blames the attempted murders on Curtis and Steven, an admission that at least means Debby knew Curtis and Steven were murderers but didn’t want to tell anyone about it until they started killing people at her house. The movie doesn’t show the conversation she had with Mrs. Brody that convinces her to drive away, and this is very disappointing because that conversation deserves to be studied. The police arrive as Mrs. Brody leaves. I wonder how large the police force is, since there hasn’t so far been a murder important enough to collect them all together in one place.
The next morning Curtis and Timmy are led away from the police station and put in the back on an unmarked car. It would look strange indeed to load two boys into the back of a regular cop car. I wonder what is going on. Are they being taken to a juvenile-detention center, or the regular jail? Are they out on bond? The legal fallout of this movie is more interesting to me than the murders. Two murderous ten-year olds, together with Debbie’s peep-hole operation, must make for some very sensational news coverage.
Mrs. Brody must be wanted as a person of interest if not an accomplice after the fact, since I will not be deluded that Curtis and Steven wouldn’t betray Debbie after she betrayed them. Debbie’s face would be all over the news. And there is no indication that Debbie will stop killing anytime soon.
Mrs. Brody changed Debbie’s name to Beth Simpson. Debbie promises to be a “good little girl”, but as Mrs. Brody drives away the camera shifts to a truck behind the gas station they were at. From what I can put together, Debbie killed the truck driver by releasing the pressure on his hydraulic jack while he changed a tire, thus crushing his head with the weight of the truck. I hope she manages to evade the police for years until she can join up again with the prison-hardened Curtis and Steven and begin another murder spree that starts with Timmy and Joyce.
Perhaps Bloody Birthday has a happy ending after all.