Sunday, May 15, 2011

BLOODY BIRTHDAY (1981) - kids are assholes, as they have yet to learn what it means to be human




If your gonna take a serious stab at making a killer brat movie, it helps to have a stellar cast: Susan Strasberg, Jose Ferrer (admittedly “cashing el senor paycheck“, but hey), Julie Brown (from MTV, but not "downtown" Julie Brown, i.e. not "urban”; read: honkey), and of course, Lori Lethin, who actually starred in three slasher type movies (this, The Prey, and the spoofy slasher Return to Horror High), a rare feat indeed. Usually after starring in two slashers (or one for that matter), actresses can no longer find work in the industry and end up retiring and starting a family, or hanging themselves, or getting into porn (or god forbid all three).

The prologue shows three kids being born at the hospital during a lunar eclipse, which somehow means they will all grow up to become pint-sized homicidal assholes. I’d like to expound further, but I shit the bed in astrology class. Flash forward to present day, and we have the ubiquitous couple making out, with the not-so-ubiquitous temerity to head to the cemetery and start fucking in a grave. I’m pretty sure they’re toast. At the scene of the crime, the local pork chop patrol finds a jump rope that was used to hang the girl. Naturally, they conclude that a young child was involved in this vicious endeavor, so lieutenant pork sandwich visits the local elementary school and asks the kids if anyone happened to commit double homicide with a skipping rope. Three particularly evil looking tykes glance at each other, as if to say “Holy shit! The fuzz is on to us!" One of these tykes happens to be the daughter of the cop, which may appear to be ironic had I not repeatedly fallen asleep in literature class.


If potentially being a munchkin murderer and the offspring of some bacon badger isn‘t unholy enough, the blonde girl charges the other two evil fucks to peep in on her older sister getting dressed (Julie Brown). She promptly appeases these perverts (and the audience) by doing a striptease in her bedroom to an appalling song that sounds like something Bob Seger might have recorded after having his testicles replaced with kumquats. The blonde moppet girl then tries to kill her cop dad by sticking a skateboard on some steps and letting him trip. When that doesn't work, her Aryan midget buddy whacks him in the back of the head with a baseball bat and simply drapes his body on the skateboard, making it look like an accident. We then get one of those god damn pretentious dead pig funerals with all that Jesus talk and what have you.



While the police and adults are baffled and/or retarded, the younger brother of Lori Lethin swiftly gets suspicious of these assholes. The evil ones catch on that he is catching on, and resultantly becomes a target of their munchkin malfeasance. They lock him in a fridge at the local junkyard at one point, but he ingeniously escapes.





Later, the psycho smurf with the glasses steals his parent’s gun and visits the home of his teacher (Susan Strasberg). He pulls the gun on her, and this upsets her to no end, leading her to sternly proclaim "if you bring that gun to school one more time, I will confiscate it!" He stands up for his right to bear arms by filling her with lead for no reason. Well, our munchkin hero confronts Mr. Glasses in the playground and pummels him. The damage would have been more severe, but Glasses was partially saved by those black pieces of rubber padding that look like puzzle pieces, whatever the hell those things are. The hero then heads to the junkyard, and his sister follows him. The kids try to run Lori over with a car, and the munchkin at the wheel is wearing a sheet with the eyeholes cut out, apparently attempting to pin the crime on the KKK. This infuriates Mr. Glasses to no end, so he grabs his trusty piece and roam the neighborhood, looking for potential victims, just because, you know…why not. Luckily, he comes across two naked teens getting it on in the back of a van, and promptly makes them pay for not wearing protection (that would be Kevlar).



We finally get to the titular "bloody birthday", a combo party for the three maniacs (if you’ve been paying attention, you would remember that it’s revealed in the prologue that they were born on the same day…stoner). Glasses gets the bright idea to put ant poison in the birthday cake, which seems like a rather underwhelming move for a guy that’s built up the resume he has up to this point. He is thwarted by our plucky heroine amidst some gratuitous background Jose Ferrer paycheck cashing. Julie Brown finds her sister’s collection of newspaper clippings of the threesome’s crimes and shows this to mommy, and, for her trouble, gets the old arrow through the eyeball trick. There is of course a funeral for JB, and thankfully, it is decidedly less pretentious than the first funeral. The presence of Michael Dudikoff (star of a bunch of horseshit ninja movies) as a mourning extra is indicative of this.

The kids then unsuccessfully attempt to kill Louise and her brother via bow and arrow, but just end up impaling a Van Halen poster instead (thankfully pre-Hagar). Later, Julie’s mother and her fraulein smurfette daughter run away, this after the other two murderers are presumably brought to justice (i.e. 4 years in juvie). The movie ends with the revelation that the girl is still a murderous little cretin, leaving the viewer to ponder an important lesson (apart from the obvious “kids are usually assholes”): don’t ever get knocked up nine months before a lunar eclipse, unless you have one of those awesome after morning pill, in which case, have at it.



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