The set-up for this monumentally useless slasher-lite drivel centers around three children who are born in the same hospital during an eclipse, a serendipitous occurrence which results in them growing up without a conscience. As their tenth birthdays approach, the trio of youngsters apparently spontaneously decide to go on a killing spree, whittling down parents, siblings, teachers, and random canoodling teens in a variety of unimaginative and unimpressive ways.
The clumsy staging of the murders is signaled from the opening scene, when two amorous dimwits meet their ends after climbing into an open grave to have sex (the lass is modest, and while she has no reservations about getting down in a cemetery, she feels exposed out in the open, thus the novel change of scenery). This silly intro sets the stage for the 85 minutes of tedious and ludicrous shenanigans which unfold while we watch the malevolent moppets go about their brutal business without any of the clueless adults in the film ever becoming suspicious. The parental ignorance might be believable if the killer kids exercised any tact, but when they repeatedly smash one of the fathers in the head with a baseball bat and his wife readily accepts their explanation that his (gruesome, one would imagine) injuries occurred when he fell down a flight of four stairs, the plot begins to spiral into absurdity.
Despite the sanguinary bounty advertised in the title, Bloody Birthday may well be the most tepid offering of the era. Only a single arrow to the eye gag even registers a blip on the gore meter, and the majority of the paltry homicidal handiwork occurs off-screen. The overall presentation is so tame and pedestrian that the film is more on par with the After School Specials which were being cranked out at this time, so if your looking for a hidden gem in the '80s slasher canon you most assuredly aren't going to find one here.
Save for a few sequences of gratuitous nudity, the only marginally amusing aspects of Bloody Birthday are the presences of a couple of the decade's semi-icons. Future B-action regular Michael Dudikoff turns up in a couple of scenes to make out with MTV host-to-be Julie Brown and stand in a few funeral assemblies with a blankly morose look on his face. Anyone who actually remembers who Brown is will undoubtedly be delighted to witness the extended strip tease she performs for herself, so if seeing her naked is on your bucket list, this outing admittedly delivers mightily on that front.
The biggest problems here are the prepubescent executioners, who are undoubtedly the least imposing genre villains ever presented. The most vicious of the bunch is a bespectacled sociopath who strongly resembles Skippy from "Family Ties" and even though he seems to possess the inhuman ability to fire a handgun that weighs as much as he does without experiencing any sort of recoil, the goofy grin he displays while he busts his caps offsets any sort of menace his massive weapon conjures up.
It takes no less than three failed murder attempts on the one shrewd classmate who figures out the remorseless bunch is up to no good for our diminutive hero's older sister to finally step up and offer her assistance. This leads us into the film's flaccid climax, where the band of grade-school slayers stalk the interloping duo but merit themselves an epic fail. One of the predators is subdued when a bowl of water is thrown in his face, while Skippy Junior simply runs out of bullets and gets beat up.
Only the lone girl in the crew uses her wiles to escape capture, and her mother (head still firmly inserted into her own backside, evidently) sneaks her away from the scene and flees town with her. The movie's coda reveals that mom and daughter remain at large after changing their names and that the lethal little girl has claimed another victim, thus setting the stage for Bloody Birthday 2, which was fortunately never excreted.
This tripe also loses points for its derivative score, which blatantly lifts music from Friday The 13th in a feeble attempt to give the murders some sort of impact. Good idea, but when the most intense scenes involve a flaxen-haired fifth-grader hiding in cupboards to choke people with a jump rope, screeching violins are a pale substitute for actual shocks.
I don't fault anyone who holds this cheap time-waster in high esteem; after all, I have certainly given pieces of my heart to plenty of atrocious movies. But since the lack of gore nudges Bloody Birthday out of the "Splatter" category and the absence of anything resembling suspense makes even the "Horror" designation a stretch, I'm really not sure how to classify this one. Is "Utter Crap" considered a genre?
The clumsy staging of the murders is signaled from the opening scene, when two amorous dimwits meet their ends after climbing into an open grave to have sex (the lass is modest, and while she has no reservations about getting down in a cemetery, she feels exposed out in the open, thus the novel change of scenery). This silly intro sets the stage for the 85 minutes of tedious and ludicrous shenanigans which unfold while we watch the malevolent moppets go about their brutal business without any of the clueless adults in the film ever becoming suspicious. The parental ignorance might be believable if the killer kids exercised any tact, but when they repeatedly smash one of the fathers in the head with a baseball bat and his wife readily accepts their explanation that his (gruesome, one would imagine) injuries occurred when he fell down a flight of four stairs, the plot begins to spiral into absurdity.
Despite the sanguinary bounty advertised in the title, Bloody Birthday may well be the most tepid offering of the era. Only a single arrow to the eye gag even registers a blip on the gore meter, and the majority of the paltry homicidal handiwork occurs off-screen. The overall presentation is so tame and pedestrian that the film is more on par with the After School Specials which were being cranked out at this time, so if your looking for a hidden gem in the '80s slasher canon you most assuredly aren't going to find one here.
Save for a few sequences of gratuitous nudity, the only marginally amusing aspects of Bloody Birthday are the presences of a couple of the decade's semi-icons. Future B-action regular Michael Dudikoff turns up in a couple of scenes to make out with MTV host-to-be Julie Brown and stand in a few funeral assemblies with a blankly morose look on his face. Anyone who actually remembers who Brown is will undoubtedly be delighted to witness the extended strip tease she performs for herself, so if seeing her naked is on your bucket list, this outing admittedly delivers mightily on that front.
The biggest problems here are the prepubescent executioners, who are undoubtedly the least imposing genre villains ever presented. The most vicious of the bunch is a bespectacled sociopath who strongly resembles Skippy from "Family Ties" and even though he seems to possess the inhuman ability to fire a handgun that weighs as much as he does without experiencing any sort of recoil, the goofy grin he displays while he busts his caps offsets any sort of menace his massive weapon conjures up.
It takes no less than three failed murder attempts on the one shrewd classmate who figures out the remorseless bunch is up to no good for our diminutive hero's older sister to finally step up and offer her assistance. This leads us into the film's flaccid climax, where the band of grade-school slayers stalk the interloping duo but merit themselves an epic fail. One of the predators is subdued when a bowl of water is thrown in his face, while Skippy Junior simply runs out of bullets and gets beat up.
Only the lone girl in the crew uses her wiles to escape capture, and her mother (head still firmly inserted into her own backside, evidently) sneaks her away from the scene and flees town with her. The movie's coda reveals that mom and daughter remain at large after changing their names and that the lethal little girl has claimed another victim, thus setting the stage for Bloody Birthday 2, which was fortunately never excreted.
This tripe also loses points for its derivative score, which blatantly lifts music from Friday The 13th in a feeble attempt to give the murders some sort of impact. Good idea, but when the most intense scenes involve a flaxen-haired fifth-grader hiding in cupboards to choke people with a jump rope, screeching violins are a pale substitute for actual shocks.
I don't fault anyone who holds this cheap time-waster in high esteem; after all, I have certainly given pieces of my heart to plenty of atrocious movies. But since the lack of gore nudges Bloody Birthday out of the "Splatter" category and the absence of anything resembling suspense makes even the "Horror" designation a stretch, I'm really not sure how to classify this one. Is "Utter Crap" considered a genre?