Happy Birthday to Me
Happy Birthday to Me is the Sixteen Candles of slasher movies.
It opens with a girl named Bernadette O’Hara leaving her dorm room, and as she does so her legs are whipped together and out from under her. The culprit is a pit-bull that has learned to use its leash to get women the same way Indiana Jones uses his whip. An old woman, Mrs. Patterson, scolds the dog and tells it to sit; somehow the subtitles know that Mrs. Patterson is married.
Bernadette is on her way to meet with the Top Ten at a bar called The Silent Woman. The Top Ten is an exclusive clique that is never clearly defined by academic or social standards, but is demented and sad all the same. The Top Ten affords Happy Birthday to Me an especially high body count, and it also provides the killer a clear list of victims right off the bat, as Bernadette is about to demonstrate.
She goes into a parking garage where she is attacked. After the killer fails to strangle her in a parked car, in which she fools him by playing dead, the killer catches her in the garage and slits her throat in a perfunctory fashion that makes me wonder why he even bothered. (The killer of Happy Birthday to Me is not revealed until the last act. Because of this, I’ve decided to alternate between the masculine and feminine pronouns so as to keep you on your toes and throw suspicion on the entire cast instead of any bastard or bitch in particular. I will do this again with Sleepaway Camp, where I will use the phrase “he or she” exclusively).
The movie cuts to a bar, where a group of Shiners are singing 99 Bottles of Beer. A group of young men is nearby, two of whom are watching the Shiners with open hostility. One of the them, a fellow named Greg, is particularly pissed with the singing. He is wearing a jacket from Harvard and has a mullet it would take ninety-nine beers to make me believe isn’t mutually exclusive with attending Harvard.
A girl named Virginia arrives and one of the girls asks her where Bernadette is. She also asks Virginia if the Shiners are at a convention. She doesn’t know that there is nothing conventional about Shriners at all. Another boy named Alfred appears; he is a taxidermist and has a pet mouse named George. If George has any sense he is not a happy mouse.
One of the Shriners decides to “start the whole thing all over again”, a redundant sentence calling for a repetition of the most redundant song ever written. Greg takes this as a taunt and shows them the business end of his mullet before slapping his hands on the table and saying “That’s it, I’ve had it”.
He grabs one of the Shriners but his girlfriend pushes him back as the Shriner gets out of his chair.
One of the boys, Rudi, addresses a Shriner as “Mr. Grand Poobah Sir” and then gives him another appositive when he asks the waitress to bring “The Grand Impotantant” a beer (I’m only guessing at the spelling). The Shriner isn’t familiar with Latin and doesn’t get offended with the insult. I don’t suppose he watches Winny the Pooh either. When Rudi goes for insults, he puts one in the head and one in the dick.
Alfred loses George and has a fit, although he never should have brought George to a bar when there’s no telling which way the wind will blow Greg’s mullet at any given time. Rudi as stolen George and then drops him in a beer he intends to give to the Shriner he calls “Your Wizardship”. The Shriner must be confused as to exactly what rank Rudi thinks he holds in the Shriner hierarchy, but this doesn’t stop him from bringing the beer to his lips and seeing George floating in it as if a witch turned one of his friends into a mouse. This causes a fight.
As the Shriners attack, which must have been as odd a phrase in the script as it is here, Greg attacks one of the older Shriners, completely disregarding the hierarchy of protocol Rudi went to such pains to emphasize. The owner of the bar shouts “You’ll pay for this, you freaks!” as the kids make it out of the bar while Greg takes on all the Shriners by himself, then knocks over a table and runs away.
When they get outside, Rudi suggests that they play “the game”, which is jumping a bridge as it opens to let boats pass underneath. It is a silly scene and no one dies, so I will play my own game and skip it.
Later Virginia is alone, walking through a graveyard where she visits her mother’s grave. While Virginia is at the grave she encounters Etienne, a member of the Top Ten. Etienne offers to walk her home. She says no, perhaps because Etienne is in a graveyard and wearing black gloves.
When she gets home, she talks with her father as Etienne sneaks up and watches the house from behind a bush. Virginia’s father did not want her “over there again”, there being her mother’s grave, which is a point of contention between them because one of them perhaps put her there.
Virginia’s father doesn’t want her to live in the past, and mentions that her psychiatrist says she should stop repressing what happened. Virginia’s amnesia and recurring flashbacks are the most irritating aspects of Happy Birthday to Me, which makes me want to be afflicted with amnesia myself when I have flashbacks from the trauma associated with this movie. I will deal with the flashbacks separately, as they occur, because they cause Virginia a great deal of pain and I want to stretch that pain out in order to make Virginia suffer as I do.
Virginia takes a bath while Etienne, not satisfied with peeping, climbs into her bedroom and steals a pair of panties. Panties, it appears, were an internationally hot commodity in the 1980s and worth risking much to obtain.
In the next scene Virginia goes to class, where the teacher shows the class how they can make a dead frog's leg move by zapping it with electricity. This brings back one of Virginia’s memories in which she is having a CAT scan and a seizure.
She visits her psychiatrist David, who explains that she was used in an experiment to rebuild brain cells. David tells her she will eventually remember the accident that gave her brain damage, which is the most foreboding phrase in the movie because “eventually” implies long intervals and Happy Birthday to Me is long enough to pace her flashbacks with all the methodical patience of a true psychopath.
In the next scene Etienne is riding a motorcycle in a race, which he wins. Virginia, ever thinking about things in the distant past, says it’s "just too bad" that Bernadette wasn't there to see him win. Etienne then says that he had to win because he was "carrying this next to my heart": this being Virginia’s panties. I'm sure those panties have been next to more than just Etienne's heart, and the only reason he won was a chance to get another pair. Virginia is angry, but she doesn't slap him, or kick him off his bike, or any of several things I would have done if someone stole my panties, and those are just the ones I steal, not my actual panties.
Virginia walks away with a friend, saying it's no wonder Bernadette took off, but her friend says that Bernadette loves it, although Greg has it and can’t stand it and that caused the Shriner ruckus. She asks Virginia if she knows that Bernadette and Etienne have "taken a room in a seedy motel and are doing it every night?” I wonder how she knows the room is seedy, which it would certainly be after “every night”.
Later Etienne is running his bike while it’s suspended on a rack as the killer sneaks up on him. She tosses his scarf in the tire as it spins, and a bemused Etienne watches it wrap around the spokes for a second before it jerks his head down and the wheel rips the flesh off his face. I do not see anything in this murder Pet Sematary 2 did that made it worth repeating.
In the next scene, the Top Eight are at The Silent Woman wondering why Etienne isn't there after they give him a toast with glasses of beer large enough to make them forget about him. Greg is worried about where Alfred is. Then Steve, a member of the Top Eight worth little mention, calls Alfred an "all-American ghoul" and that's the second time I've heard “ghoul” used in a slasher movie with "Birthday" in the title. Rudi goes as far as to say that the girls would "like to be stuffed by Alfred" but he doesn't go the extra mile and say Alfred would have to kill them first.
Meanwhile Ann and Virginia are going to visit Alfred. Ann discovers that Alfred isn't home, but "there is a window open" and so I guess Virginia and Ann are about to find out all anyone would ever care to know about Alfred's stuffing.
Alfred has stuffed animals in his room as well as plaster molds for masks. There is something that looks like a head on a table covered with a cloth that draws Virginia's attention. Ann lifts the sheet and the head underneath it looks like Bernadette's, but I never got a good look at Bernadette and cannot reconcile the head with my memory of Bernadette that Ann corrupted with her seedy-hotel story.
Virginia and Ann try to flee but are caught by Alfred. Ann is quick with an explanation that they were worried and came looking for him when he didn't "show up at the inn". Alfred doesn't believe them, and thinks they were worried about Bernadette instead. He calls Bernadette his masterpiece, and he is very proud of her. It turns out that the head is a fake one, but I would not believe he had a fake head of Bernadette made on the off chance Ann and Virginia broke into his house to take a look around, and would be even more concerned about where the rest of his Bernadette model is, as well as how Bernadette’s disappearance might connect with her reappearance as a potential sex toy Alfred has chopped up for reasons best left for the police to untangle.
In the next scene Virginia is summoned to Mrs. Patterson's office, who is "on the warpath". When Virginia walks in Mrs. Patterson is on the phone with Mr. O'Hara about Bernadette, as Mrs. Patterson seems to be the only one who notices Bernadette is missing and will do something about it other than keep partying as if she's still around. Mrs. Patterson believes that Virginia and the rest of the Top Ten sneer at working-class people and thus assigns her to detention that should "jog her memory.". It is Mrs. Patterson’s memory that needs jogging because she still thinks there is a Top Ten.
Ann makes plans for the whole gang to go see "High Noon".
Everyone but Rudy goes to see the movie, and he has grounds for being sour about not being invited. Rudi is very angry with Maggie in particular. Steve and Rudi begin to fight until Greg steps in and shoves Steve aside and pushes Rudi back into the car. This earns Greg a death threat from Rudi that looks as serious as death threats from men like Rudy can get.
Later Greg is lifting weights and hears a noise. He recognizes the killer when she comes inside. Greg asks the killer to put more weight on the bar and the killer slaps on more weight than he asked for. Then the killer takes a ten-pound weight and drops it on Greg’s penis, and being unable to hold the bar without any balls Greg lets go of the weights and apparently dies, although whether Greg was murdered or committed suicide depends on whether Greg was so vain he could not live without his penis.
Amelia shows up with a pizza and a six pack of beer, which are jut the accessories I would want her to have when she finds her dead boyfriend. When she goes inside all the blood is mopped out of the carpet and a bar with six weights on it falls over, just missing her head. The six-pack-and-pizza-after-workout routine must have been well known among the Top Ten when there was still ten of them around to make fun of it.
After the Academy soccer team wins a game, Rudi and Virginia agree to have a date that upsets Maggie and solidifies the dissolution of the group.
Rudi, as if in a movie all his own, runs by a flower garden and buries a cloth.
Later Rudy and Virginia are walking up a stone staircase in a tower in a chapel. Rudi realizes that if he cuts a rope a bell will fall down. The movie cuts to the floor of the chapel, where blood is dripping from above in the bell tower. A priest pulls the rope, it falls down, and he notices blood on the end, then blood on the floor and says "Help. Murder!"
Virginia runs into a hospital and asks for Dr. Faraday. As she runs towards his office, a woman with a bad head injury is rolled away on a stretcher, and another one of Virginia’s goddamn repressed memories resurfaces as a flashback. In the flashback she has an operation on her brain that seems to go well but then the doctor says she's dead at the end.
In the next scene Dr. Faraday gets his paper, then hears the news report about the missing students. Etienne is mentioned, "… the son of Ambassador Adrien Vercures". Greg is the son of Nathaniel Hellman, "chairman of the Trans-Allied Finance Corporation". All the parents of the victims in this movie have long and important-sounding appositives.
The Top Eight or Seven gather in a building and discuss the disappearances. Maggie arrives and says the police think Greg "may be dead", and this gives her permission to cry.
Dr. Faraday shows up and grabs Virginia by the wrist and wants to know exactly what happened at the bell tower. Then one of detectives investigating the disappearances is called outside and an extra tells The Top Eight or So that he thinks "they found something.".
The police have found the scarf that Rudi buried in the flower garden earlier. Meanwhile Virginia is walking around in the library and Rudi's body falls from above and lands on the floor. When Virginia walks away, disgusted, Rudi grabs her and says "Hi there." Virginia calls him a creep and explains that the school is being "turned upside down" looking for him.
Outside the police continue digging, and as the camera focuses on Amelia as she cries I begin to hope they are digging Greg's head out of the dirt, or even better his flattened penis that is now fucked beyond even her recognition. It is revealed to be a skull after Dr. Faraday brushes some of the dirt off, and it was probably a skull before it was buried because there is no way it rotted right there in the middle of the college without a dog digging it up.
Rudy and Virginia come outside and Maggie tells Rudy that she thought he was the skull. Rudy, however, is "still a bastard", and he always will be seeing as there's no way he can change what vagina he came out of much less what semen went into it.
Dr. Faraday has a conversation with Virginia about the "macabre sense of humor" of her friends. I too bury plastic bones at random places and hope the police think they’re a murder when they’re dug up.
The group smokes marijuana and notice that Alfred has disappeared, and Rudy says Alfred is not a dissappearer, but a "dissappearee", which means that Alfred was disappeared by someone and did not do his disappearing himself. When Steve asks Virginia if she has seen the phantom taxidermist she notices a woman floating in the aquarium behind them who must be dead or a hallucination, and I'm hoping she's dead so Virginia doesn't have another pointless flashback. It turns out to be Maggie pretending to be dead, who I assume has mourned Greg out of her system and is now in a mood to take advantage of the paranoia his death has occasioned.
Virginia drives away from the school so I can enjoy one of her flashbacks in motion: in this flashback someone drowns. She goes home and puts more flowers on her mother's grave, where Alfred watches, having risen a rank in the Top Ten that allows peeping and stalking privileges. He is about to say something, and then as he reaches into his pocket very slowly, Virginia turns around and stabs him in the stomach, although I don't know with what because the movie was too concerned with what was in Alfred’s pocket. I only care about Alfred as far as I know what Alfred is getting stabbed with.
Virginia's father gets a call as soon as he arrives home; it appears something blew up somewhere and he will have to go and look at it and this upsets Virginia because he will miss her birthday. He promises that he will back.
The next scene is a disco boogie and everyone is happy except Amelia who especially misses Greg and his disco-boogie abilities. Rudy asks if Virginia has seen Alfred, and then says "6 down 4 to go." Virginia does not think this is funny, but I appreciate Rudi’s keeping track of the bodies by number instead of by name.
Steve wants Rudi to dance with Maggie, because Maggie is driving him nuts, which means Maggie is giving him blue balls and Virginia might be a sure fire way to get rid of them. Virginia invites Steve over to her house, since her father is away for the weekend, and she also mentions that she makes "real good midnight snacks". I don't want to fill in the sexual innuendo there and so I won't. The camera ends the scene by panning down to Maggie's backside and then stopping as she shakes her butt to the music. And since she's wearing a black dress the movie can fade to black and transition to the next scene as if it came straight out of her ass.
Later Steve is getting ready to make love by sipping wine and smoking a joint by an open fire. Virginia comes in with some shish kabobs. They begin to make out, then Steve says his ass is burning so Virginia starts to feed him more from the shish kabob. I don't see the cause-effect relationship here but that is literally what happened. When she puts the kabob back in the pan, she says "Well have some more" and then stabs him in the mouth.
He lays his head down on the pillow with blood coming out of his mouth and even adjusts himself to get comfortable as if Virginia still wants to have sex with him.
Next Ann shows up at Virginia’s house, where she honks the horn outside, but Virginia has a murder hangover and is late getting up. Ann wants to hear "all the gory details about you and Steve last night." I think Ann would be more disappointed with the details of Steve's death than any sex he could have had with Virginia, especially if that sex involved more shish kabobs. Virginia decides to take a shower.
She has a flashback in the shower, this time of someone drinking while driving in the rain. She and her mother are going somewhere. While she is driving she gets caught on the draw bridge and then the bridge opens and the car falls down. Inside the flooding car Virginia says "Mommy, we have to get out. The water is rising." because Virginia’s mother is apparently too drunk to have noticed a change from driving in the rain to drowning in a river. Virginia makes it out of the car and swims to the surface, where she hits her head on the propeller of a boat.
Virginia has flooded her bathroom during this flashback, and Ann is inside the tub with a slit throat. It angers me greatly that Ann was killed why Virginia was having a flashback, even if the murder was as dull as it seems it was. Virginia sits in a corner and shouts "No!" several times.
David shows up later that night. Virginia is sitting on the stairs, and she immediately says "I killed her. I killed Ann." She also tells him that Ann is upstairs in the bathroom, but David takes his time going up the stairs, which shows that if he is confidant Virginia killed Ann, he's also confidant that Virginia won't kill him. He's even impatient for her to come up the stairs with him. He has to force her upstairs as she screams and flails her arms the entire time. I love hysterical people in horror movies almost as much as I love missing murders because the main character can’t remember the movie I’m watching. The tub is empty when he pulls back the shower curtain, and Virginia collapses on the floor.
Dr. Faraday may not believe that Virginia is killing her friends, but they’re certainly missing, and as a professional he has an obligation to at least take Virginia seriously when she claims to have killed one of them. He invites himself over for the night, and then Virginia realizes that since it's after 12:00, it's her birthday. This movie relies far too much on Virginia, who has more involuntary memories than Proust, to move the plot forward with those memories, even with Dr. Faraday there to ignore and enable her murders.
In the next scene the police are going through bushes on the side of the road by Virginia's house as if there was a prison break or something even more exiting I missed on account of Virginia.
David speaks with Virginia and tells her the police are looking for Ann, which makes Virginia think she killed Ann all over again and then go into hysterics all over again. He shows her the front page of the newspaper, which is merely a story about the disappearance of her friends.
Virginia then settles down for her final flashback without the benefit of a trigger device. This time she narrates over the entire flashback, which is infuriating because it makes me doubt that it is a flashback but instead a memory Virginia is forcing on me. Her mother was having a birthday that she invited all of the richest kids in town to. Then her mother asks where her friends are, and Virginia says "They're not coming!" with such a petulant pout that I’m going to call it the Face that Launched a Thousand Rewinds. It turns out there is a rival party at Ann's house, which implies a rival birthday and rival sex lives that unfortunately culminated with Virginia and Ann. Virginia's mother says "Those goddamn little snots.", and I begin to wonder why the movie did not have Virginia’s drunk mother as the killer. She downs a glass of vodka and says they're going to Ann's party.
When she gets to the house, she has an argument with the gatekeeper about letting her in. It has something to do with her past that doesn't make her respectable enough to get past the gate. And I conclude that Virginia and her mother left the gate in a state that caused Virginia’s mother’s death.
Virginia wakes up from this apparent nightmare in the worst fit she has so far had.
She grabs a fire poker while Dr. Faraday mediates in the darkness of her room. She hits him over the head once, and then the movie cuts to the door of her closet covered in blood, more blood than could ever come out of a head wound in one second.
Virginia's father arrives home with some birthday presents. At least he knows the practical value about taking Virginia's birthdays seriously after the death of his wife. He asks for Virginia a few times and then goes upstairs to find her. When he gets to her bedroom he sees all the blood splattered on the wall from Dr. Faraday. Fortunately, he thinks Virginia has been murdered and this gives him a chance to overreact. He runs back outside to the graveyard I keep forgetting is in the backyard and a perfect place to dispose of fresh bodies. He finds Amelia at the mother's grave, but she is unresponsive. There is also a grave that has been dug up and an empty coffin, which can only mean that Virginia dug up her mother so she didn't miss her birthday as well. David's body is by the grave, where I suppose he will by degrees decompose alongside it.
Her father goes into a building by the cemetery where there is a table set up. The first dead body he sees is his wife's, who died with a such bad face it’s as if the morticians could not sculpt it back to its former self, which was in fact so foul it had creases of quadruple-distilled rage all along her eyes. Virginia then comes in with a birthday cake singing a reflexive version of the "Birthday Song" from which the movie gets its title. At the table are all the bodies of the Top Ten Virginia has killed.
Virginia approaches her father with a butcher knife as he tries to absorb what she did by saying "Baby" several times in various phrases. Virginia implies that her father gets to live because he came to her birthday party. She puts a birthday hat on his head while he cries with his hands over his face. Then she makes the most curious wish in slasher history and blows out the candles. She has an abrupt mood swing after her father mumbles about the doctors being so sure, calls him a bastard, and slices his throat. There are a lot of bastards in this movie, which means there was a lot of scandalous sex going on when it was conceived. He falls face first on the table just shy of the birthday cake.
Then she says "And now for you, bitch" and walks over to Ann. For a second I think she has singled out Ann for some special postmortem mutilation, but it turns out to be Virginia's twin. One brain surgery, several hysterical fits, even more repressed flashbacks, and too many lame kills are enough to make this movie bad without a doppelganger plot thrown in. She apparently did all of this for Virginia. And she has a special treat for the guests: they get to watch Virginia die.
As Virginia's sister tries to stab her, the most outlandish and stupid thing I have seen in a slasher movie occurs: Virginia pulls off a mask, a skintight rubber one apparently, and suddenly it's Ann. Ann would not look exactly like Virginia no matter what mask was put on, even Virginia's own skinned face. It turns out Ann has been making Virginia pass out and then commits the murders while masquerading as Virginia through various windows of time I am not about to try and figure out and probably never will because it's fucking impossible. There's a backtrack, however, as follows:
Ann followed Alfred to the cemetery, then doped Virginia with chloroform and killed him, thus splitting her MO between two victims when she should be doping and killing only one. She also implies she got the mask from Alfred, which should make it very puzzling to him as to who actually killed him. Ann also could have disguised herself as Bernadette or a bald eagle for that matter because none of her victims are going to rat out Virginia after they’re dead.
Then she explains the night with Steve. Here Virginia gets chloroformed while making a midnight snack. Even Virginia should remember getting chloroformed several times, but thank God in Heaven she has not had flashbacks of being chloroformed although this James-Bond-villain flashback-explanation of Ann’s is just as bad.
Virginia turns her head slowly so she can see all the dead bodies Ann has gone to great lengths to bring to their birthday party. Ann calls Virginia a whore because she is her father's mistresses’ daughter – you know when there are multiple possessives you're in Soap Opera Land – and thus her half-sister. Apparently all the shit at the gate was the result of Virginia's father having an affair of which Virginia is the result. She tries to stab Virginia but Virginia blocks the stab and then stabs her in the stomach. Ann dies very quickly.
Ann's father arrives after this and of course believes Virginia has committed all the murders. And for all its bullshit, the movie actually has the guts to end with that.
Happy Birthday to Me is the Sixteen Candles of slasher movies.
It opens with a girl named Bernadette O’Hara leaving her dorm room, and as she does so her legs are whipped together and out from under her. The culprit is a pit-bull that has learned to use its leash to get women the same way Indiana Jones uses his whip. An old woman, Mrs. Patterson, scolds the dog and tells it to sit; somehow the subtitles know that Mrs. Patterson is married.
Bernadette is on her way to meet with the Top Ten at a bar called The Silent Woman. The Top Ten is an exclusive clique that is never clearly defined by academic or social standards, but is demented and sad all the same. The Top Ten affords Happy Birthday to Me an especially high body count, and it also provides the killer a clear list of victims right off the bat, as Bernadette is about to demonstrate.
She goes into a parking garage where she is attacked. After the killer fails to strangle her in a parked car, in which she fools him by playing dead, the killer catches her in the garage and slits her throat in a perfunctory fashion that makes me wonder why he even bothered. (The killer of Happy Birthday to Me is not revealed until the last act. Because of this, I’ve decided to alternate between the masculine and feminine pronouns so as to keep you on your toes and throw suspicion on the entire cast instead of any bastard or bitch in particular. I will do this again with Sleepaway Camp, where I will use the phrase “he or she” exclusively).
The movie cuts to a bar, where a group of Shiners are singing 99 Bottles of Beer. A group of young men is nearby, two of whom are watching the Shiners with open hostility. One of the them, a fellow named Greg, is particularly pissed with the singing. He is wearing a jacket from Harvard and has a mullet it would take ninety-nine beers to make me believe isn’t mutually exclusive with attending Harvard.
A girl named Virginia arrives and one of the girls asks her where Bernadette is. She also asks Virginia if the Shiners are at a convention. She doesn’t know that there is nothing conventional about Shriners at all. Another boy named Alfred appears; he is a taxidermist and has a pet mouse named George. If George has any sense he is not a happy mouse.
One of the Shriners decides to “start the whole thing all over again”, a redundant sentence calling for a repetition of the most redundant song ever written. Greg takes this as a taunt and shows them the business end of his mullet before slapping his hands on the table and saying “That’s it, I’ve had it”.
He grabs one of the Shriners but his girlfriend pushes him back as the Shriner gets out of his chair.
One of the boys, Rudi, addresses a Shriner as “Mr. Grand Poobah Sir” and then gives him another appositive when he asks the waitress to bring “The Grand Impotantant” a beer (I’m only guessing at the spelling). The Shriner isn’t familiar with Latin and doesn’t get offended with the insult. I don’t suppose he watches Winny the Pooh either. When Rudi goes for insults, he puts one in the head and one in the dick.
Alfred loses George and has a fit, although he never should have brought George to a bar when there’s no telling which way the wind will blow Greg’s mullet at any given time. Rudi as stolen George and then drops him in a beer he intends to give to the Shriner he calls “Your Wizardship”. The Shriner must be confused as to exactly what rank Rudi thinks he holds in the Shriner hierarchy, but this doesn’t stop him from bringing the beer to his lips and seeing George floating in it as if a witch turned one of his friends into a mouse. This causes a fight.
As the Shriners attack, which must have been as odd a phrase in the script as it is here, Greg attacks one of the older Shriners, completely disregarding the hierarchy of protocol Rudi went to such pains to emphasize. The owner of the bar shouts “You’ll pay for this, you freaks!” as the kids make it out of the bar while Greg takes on all the Shriners by himself, then knocks over a table and runs away.
When they get outside, Rudi suggests that they play “the game”, which is jumping a bridge as it opens to let boats pass underneath. It is a silly scene and no one dies, so I will play my own game and skip it.
Later Virginia is alone, walking through a graveyard where she visits her mother’s grave. While Virginia is at the grave she encounters Etienne, a member of the Top Ten. Etienne offers to walk her home. She says no, perhaps because Etienne is in a graveyard and wearing black gloves.
When she gets home, she talks with her father as Etienne sneaks up and watches the house from behind a bush. Virginia’s father did not want her “over there again”, there being her mother’s grave, which is a point of contention between them because one of them perhaps put her there.
Virginia’s father doesn’t want her to live in the past, and mentions that her psychiatrist says she should stop repressing what happened. Virginia’s amnesia and recurring flashbacks are the most irritating aspects of Happy Birthday to Me, which makes me want to be afflicted with amnesia myself when I have flashbacks from the trauma associated with this movie. I will deal with the flashbacks separately, as they occur, because they cause Virginia a great deal of pain and I want to stretch that pain out in order to make Virginia suffer as I do.
Virginia takes a bath while Etienne, not satisfied with peeping, climbs into her bedroom and steals a pair of panties. Panties, it appears, were an internationally hot commodity in the 1980s and worth risking much to obtain.
In the next scene Virginia goes to class, where the teacher shows the class how they can make a dead frog's leg move by zapping it with electricity. This brings back one of Virginia’s memories in which she is having a CAT scan and a seizure.
She visits her psychiatrist David, who explains that she was used in an experiment to rebuild brain cells. David tells her she will eventually remember the accident that gave her brain damage, which is the most foreboding phrase in the movie because “eventually” implies long intervals and Happy Birthday to Me is long enough to pace her flashbacks with all the methodical patience of a true psychopath.
In the next scene Etienne is riding a motorcycle in a race, which he wins. Virginia, ever thinking about things in the distant past, says it’s "just too bad" that Bernadette wasn't there to see him win. Etienne then says that he had to win because he was "carrying this next to my heart": this being Virginia’s panties. I'm sure those panties have been next to more than just Etienne's heart, and the only reason he won was a chance to get another pair. Virginia is angry, but she doesn't slap him, or kick him off his bike, or any of several things I would have done if someone stole my panties, and those are just the ones I steal, not my actual panties.
Virginia walks away with a friend, saying it's no wonder Bernadette took off, but her friend says that Bernadette loves it, although Greg has it and can’t stand it and that caused the Shriner ruckus. She asks Virginia if she knows that Bernadette and Etienne have "taken a room in a seedy motel and are doing it every night?” I wonder how she knows the room is seedy, which it would certainly be after “every night”.
Later Etienne is running his bike while it’s suspended on a rack as the killer sneaks up on him. She tosses his scarf in the tire as it spins, and a bemused Etienne watches it wrap around the spokes for a second before it jerks his head down and the wheel rips the flesh off his face. I do not see anything in this murder Pet Sematary 2 did that made it worth repeating.
In the next scene, the Top Eight are at The Silent Woman wondering why Etienne isn't there after they give him a toast with glasses of beer large enough to make them forget about him. Greg is worried about where Alfred is. Then Steve, a member of the Top Eight worth little mention, calls Alfred an "all-American ghoul" and that's the second time I've heard “ghoul” used in a slasher movie with "Birthday" in the title. Rudi goes as far as to say that the girls would "like to be stuffed by Alfred" but he doesn't go the extra mile and say Alfred would have to kill them first.
Meanwhile Ann and Virginia are going to visit Alfred. Ann discovers that Alfred isn't home, but "there is a window open" and so I guess Virginia and Ann are about to find out all anyone would ever care to know about Alfred's stuffing.
Alfred has stuffed animals in his room as well as plaster molds for masks. There is something that looks like a head on a table covered with a cloth that draws Virginia's attention. Ann lifts the sheet and the head underneath it looks like Bernadette's, but I never got a good look at Bernadette and cannot reconcile the head with my memory of Bernadette that Ann corrupted with her seedy-hotel story.
Virginia and Ann try to flee but are caught by Alfred. Ann is quick with an explanation that they were worried and came looking for him when he didn't "show up at the inn". Alfred doesn't believe them, and thinks they were worried about Bernadette instead. He calls Bernadette his masterpiece, and he is very proud of her. It turns out that the head is a fake one, but I would not believe he had a fake head of Bernadette made on the off chance Ann and Virginia broke into his house to take a look around, and would be even more concerned about where the rest of his Bernadette model is, as well as how Bernadette’s disappearance might connect with her reappearance as a potential sex toy Alfred has chopped up for reasons best left for the police to untangle.
In the next scene Virginia is summoned to Mrs. Patterson's office, who is "on the warpath". When Virginia walks in Mrs. Patterson is on the phone with Mr. O'Hara about Bernadette, as Mrs. Patterson seems to be the only one who notices Bernadette is missing and will do something about it other than keep partying as if she's still around. Mrs. Patterson believes that Virginia and the rest of the Top Ten sneer at working-class people and thus assigns her to detention that should "jog her memory.". It is Mrs. Patterson’s memory that needs jogging because she still thinks there is a Top Ten.
Ann makes plans for the whole gang to go see "High Noon".
Everyone but Rudy goes to see the movie, and he has grounds for being sour about not being invited. Rudi is very angry with Maggie in particular. Steve and Rudi begin to fight until Greg steps in and shoves Steve aside and pushes Rudi back into the car. This earns Greg a death threat from Rudi that looks as serious as death threats from men like Rudy can get.
Later Greg is lifting weights and hears a noise. He recognizes the killer when she comes inside. Greg asks the killer to put more weight on the bar and the killer slaps on more weight than he asked for. Then the killer takes a ten-pound weight and drops it on Greg’s penis, and being unable to hold the bar without any balls Greg lets go of the weights and apparently dies, although whether Greg was murdered or committed suicide depends on whether Greg was so vain he could not live without his penis.
Amelia shows up with a pizza and a six pack of beer, which are jut the accessories I would want her to have when she finds her dead boyfriend. When she goes inside all the blood is mopped out of the carpet and a bar with six weights on it falls over, just missing her head. The six-pack-and-pizza-after-workout routine must have been well known among the Top Ten when there was still ten of them around to make fun of it.
After the Academy soccer team wins a game, Rudi and Virginia agree to have a date that upsets Maggie and solidifies the dissolution of the group.
Rudi, as if in a movie all his own, runs by a flower garden and buries a cloth.
Later Rudy and Virginia are walking up a stone staircase in a tower in a chapel. Rudi realizes that if he cuts a rope a bell will fall down. The movie cuts to the floor of the chapel, where blood is dripping from above in the bell tower. A priest pulls the rope, it falls down, and he notices blood on the end, then blood on the floor and says "Help. Murder!"
Virginia runs into a hospital and asks for Dr. Faraday. As she runs towards his office, a woman with a bad head injury is rolled away on a stretcher, and another one of Virginia’s goddamn repressed memories resurfaces as a flashback. In the flashback she has an operation on her brain that seems to go well but then the doctor says she's dead at the end.
In the next scene Dr. Faraday gets his paper, then hears the news report about the missing students. Etienne is mentioned, "… the son of Ambassador Adrien Vercures". Greg is the son of Nathaniel Hellman, "chairman of the Trans-Allied Finance Corporation". All the parents of the victims in this movie have long and important-sounding appositives.
The Top Eight or Seven gather in a building and discuss the disappearances. Maggie arrives and says the police think Greg "may be dead", and this gives her permission to cry.
Dr. Faraday shows up and grabs Virginia by the wrist and wants to know exactly what happened at the bell tower. Then one of detectives investigating the disappearances is called outside and an extra tells The Top Eight or So that he thinks "they found something.".
The police have found the scarf that Rudi buried in the flower garden earlier. Meanwhile Virginia is walking around in the library and Rudi's body falls from above and lands on the floor. When Virginia walks away, disgusted, Rudi grabs her and says "Hi there." Virginia calls him a creep and explains that the school is being "turned upside down" looking for him.
Outside the police continue digging, and as the camera focuses on Amelia as she cries I begin to hope they are digging Greg's head out of the dirt, or even better his flattened penis that is now fucked beyond even her recognition. It is revealed to be a skull after Dr. Faraday brushes some of the dirt off, and it was probably a skull before it was buried because there is no way it rotted right there in the middle of the college without a dog digging it up.
Rudy and Virginia come outside and Maggie tells Rudy that she thought he was the skull. Rudy, however, is "still a bastard", and he always will be seeing as there's no way he can change what vagina he came out of much less what semen went into it.
Dr. Faraday has a conversation with Virginia about the "macabre sense of humor" of her friends. I too bury plastic bones at random places and hope the police think they’re a murder when they’re dug up.
The group smokes marijuana and notice that Alfred has disappeared, and Rudy says Alfred is not a dissappearer, but a "dissappearee", which means that Alfred was disappeared by someone and did not do his disappearing himself. When Steve asks Virginia if she has seen the phantom taxidermist she notices a woman floating in the aquarium behind them who must be dead or a hallucination, and I'm hoping she's dead so Virginia doesn't have another pointless flashback. It turns out to be Maggie pretending to be dead, who I assume has mourned Greg out of her system and is now in a mood to take advantage of the paranoia his death has occasioned.
Virginia drives away from the school so I can enjoy one of her flashbacks in motion: in this flashback someone drowns. She goes home and puts more flowers on her mother's grave, where Alfred watches, having risen a rank in the Top Ten that allows peeping and stalking privileges. He is about to say something, and then as he reaches into his pocket very slowly, Virginia turns around and stabs him in the stomach, although I don't know with what because the movie was too concerned with what was in Alfred’s pocket. I only care about Alfred as far as I know what Alfred is getting stabbed with.
Virginia's father gets a call as soon as he arrives home; it appears something blew up somewhere and he will have to go and look at it and this upsets Virginia because he will miss her birthday. He promises that he will back.
The next scene is a disco boogie and everyone is happy except Amelia who especially misses Greg and his disco-boogie abilities. Rudy asks if Virginia has seen Alfred, and then says "6 down 4 to go." Virginia does not think this is funny, but I appreciate Rudi’s keeping track of the bodies by number instead of by name.
Steve wants Rudi to dance with Maggie, because Maggie is driving him nuts, which means Maggie is giving him blue balls and Virginia might be a sure fire way to get rid of them. Virginia invites Steve over to her house, since her father is away for the weekend, and she also mentions that she makes "real good midnight snacks". I don't want to fill in the sexual innuendo there and so I won't. The camera ends the scene by panning down to Maggie's backside and then stopping as she shakes her butt to the music. And since she's wearing a black dress the movie can fade to black and transition to the next scene as if it came straight out of her ass.
Later Steve is getting ready to make love by sipping wine and smoking a joint by an open fire. Virginia comes in with some shish kabobs. They begin to make out, then Steve says his ass is burning so Virginia starts to feed him more from the shish kabob. I don't see the cause-effect relationship here but that is literally what happened. When she puts the kabob back in the pan, she says "Well have some more" and then stabs him in the mouth.
He lays his head down on the pillow with blood coming out of his mouth and even adjusts himself to get comfortable as if Virginia still wants to have sex with him.
Next Ann shows up at Virginia’s house, where she honks the horn outside, but Virginia has a murder hangover and is late getting up. Ann wants to hear "all the gory details about you and Steve last night." I think Ann would be more disappointed with the details of Steve's death than any sex he could have had with Virginia, especially if that sex involved more shish kabobs. Virginia decides to take a shower.
She has a flashback in the shower, this time of someone drinking while driving in the rain. She and her mother are going somewhere. While she is driving she gets caught on the draw bridge and then the bridge opens and the car falls down. Inside the flooding car Virginia says "Mommy, we have to get out. The water is rising." because Virginia’s mother is apparently too drunk to have noticed a change from driving in the rain to drowning in a river. Virginia makes it out of the car and swims to the surface, where she hits her head on the propeller of a boat.
Virginia has flooded her bathroom during this flashback, and Ann is inside the tub with a slit throat. It angers me greatly that Ann was killed why Virginia was having a flashback, even if the murder was as dull as it seems it was. Virginia sits in a corner and shouts "No!" several times.
David shows up later that night. Virginia is sitting on the stairs, and she immediately says "I killed her. I killed Ann." She also tells him that Ann is upstairs in the bathroom, but David takes his time going up the stairs, which shows that if he is confidant Virginia killed Ann, he's also confidant that Virginia won't kill him. He's even impatient for her to come up the stairs with him. He has to force her upstairs as she screams and flails her arms the entire time. I love hysterical people in horror movies almost as much as I love missing murders because the main character can’t remember the movie I’m watching. The tub is empty when he pulls back the shower curtain, and Virginia collapses on the floor.
Dr. Faraday may not believe that Virginia is killing her friends, but they’re certainly missing, and as a professional he has an obligation to at least take Virginia seriously when she claims to have killed one of them. He invites himself over for the night, and then Virginia realizes that since it's after 12:00, it's her birthday. This movie relies far too much on Virginia, who has more involuntary memories than Proust, to move the plot forward with those memories, even with Dr. Faraday there to ignore and enable her murders.
In the next scene the police are going through bushes on the side of the road by Virginia's house as if there was a prison break or something even more exiting I missed on account of Virginia.
David speaks with Virginia and tells her the police are looking for Ann, which makes Virginia think she killed Ann all over again and then go into hysterics all over again. He shows her the front page of the newspaper, which is merely a story about the disappearance of her friends.
Virginia then settles down for her final flashback without the benefit of a trigger device. This time she narrates over the entire flashback, which is infuriating because it makes me doubt that it is a flashback but instead a memory Virginia is forcing on me. Her mother was having a birthday that she invited all of the richest kids in town to. Then her mother asks where her friends are, and Virginia says "They're not coming!" with such a petulant pout that I’m going to call it the Face that Launched a Thousand Rewinds. It turns out there is a rival party at Ann's house, which implies a rival birthday and rival sex lives that unfortunately culminated with Virginia and Ann. Virginia's mother says "Those goddamn little snots.", and I begin to wonder why the movie did not have Virginia’s drunk mother as the killer. She downs a glass of vodka and says they're going to Ann's party.
When she gets to the house, she has an argument with the gatekeeper about letting her in. It has something to do with her past that doesn't make her respectable enough to get past the gate. And I conclude that Virginia and her mother left the gate in a state that caused Virginia’s mother’s death.
Virginia wakes up from this apparent nightmare in the worst fit she has so far had.
She grabs a fire poker while Dr. Faraday mediates in the darkness of her room. She hits him over the head once, and then the movie cuts to the door of her closet covered in blood, more blood than could ever come out of a head wound in one second.
Virginia's father arrives home with some birthday presents. At least he knows the practical value about taking Virginia's birthdays seriously after the death of his wife. He asks for Virginia a few times and then goes upstairs to find her. When he gets to her bedroom he sees all the blood splattered on the wall from Dr. Faraday. Fortunately, he thinks Virginia has been murdered and this gives him a chance to overreact. He runs back outside to the graveyard I keep forgetting is in the backyard and a perfect place to dispose of fresh bodies. He finds Amelia at the mother's grave, but she is unresponsive. There is also a grave that has been dug up and an empty coffin, which can only mean that Virginia dug up her mother so she didn't miss her birthday as well. David's body is by the grave, where I suppose he will by degrees decompose alongside it.
Her father goes into a building by the cemetery where there is a table set up. The first dead body he sees is his wife's, who died with a such bad face it’s as if the morticians could not sculpt it back to its former self, which was in fact so foul it had creases of quadruple-distilled rage all along her eyes. Virginia then comes in with a birthday cake singing a reflexive version of the "Birthday Song" from which the movie gets its title. At the table are all the bodies of the Top Ten Virginia has killed.
Virginia approaches her father with a butcher knife as he tries to absorb what she did by saying "Baby" several times in various phrases. Virginia implies that her father gets to live because he came to her birthday party. She puts a birthday hat on his head while he cries with his hands over his face. Then she makes the most curious wish in slasher history and blows out the candles. She has an abrupt mood swing after her father mumbles about the doctors being so sure, calls him a bastard, and slices his throat. There are a lot of bastards in this movie, which means there was a lot of scandalous sex going on when it was conceived. He falls face first on the table just shy of the birthday cake.
Then she says "And now for you, bitch" and walks over to Ann. For a second I think she has singled out Ann for some special postmortem mutilation, but it turns out to be Virginia's twin. One brain surgery, several hysterical fits, even more repressed flashbacks, and too many lame kills are enough to make this movie bad without a doppelganger plot thrown in. She apparently did all of this for Virginia. And she has a special treat for the guests: they get to watch Virginia die.
As Virginia's sister tries to stab her, the most outlandish and stupid thing I have seen in a slasher movie occurs: Virginia pulls off a mask, a skintight rubber one apparently, and suddenly it's Ann. Ann would not look exactly like Virginia no matter what mask was put on, even Virginia's own skinned face. It turns out Ann has been making Virginia pass out and then commits the murders while masquerading as Virginia through various windows of time I am not about to try and figure out and probably never will because it's fucking impossible. There's a backtrack, however, as follows:
Ann followed Alfred to the cemetery, then doped Virginia with chloroform and killed him, thus splitting her MO between two victims when she should be doping and killing only one. She also implies she got the mask from Alfred, which should make it very puzzling to him as to who actually killed him. Ann also could have disguised herself as Bernadette or a bald eagle for that matter because none of her victims are going to rat out Virginia after they’re dead.
Then she explains the night with Steve. Here Virginia gets chloroformed while making a midnight snack. Even Virginia should remember getting chloroformed several times, but thank God in Heaven she has not had flashbacks of being chloroformed although this James-Bond-villain flashback-explanation of Ann’s is just as bad.
Virginia turns her head slowly so she can see all the dead bodies Ann has gone to great lengths to bring to their birthday party. Ann calls Virginia a whore because she is her father's mistresses’ daughter – you know when there are multiple possessives you're in Soap Opera Land – and thus her half-sister. Apparently all the shit at the gate was the result of Virginia's father having an affair of which Virginia is the result. She tries to stab Virginia but Virginia blocks the stab and then stabs her in the stomach. Ann dies very quickly.
Ann's father arrives after this and of course believes Virginia has committed all the murders. And for all its bullshit, the movie actually has the guts to end with that.