Happy Birthday to Me

**_Unique, lush slasher with a notable cast fumbles at the end_** A teen returns to a hoity-toity private academy in the Northeast after a seriously traumatic experience (Melissa Sue Anderson) where members of the so-called Top Ten circle start to perish one-by-one. Who’s the killer and why? Glenn Ford is on hand as the girl’s psychiatrist. "Happy Birthday to Me" (1981) is both a slasher and a whodunit, similar to “Friday the 13th” from the year prior, except with the milieu of a prep school. The lush setting, mostly taking place at night, is noteworthy and the unique perspective of director J. Lee Thompson gives the flick a different ‘feel’ compared to other slashers from the period. Furthermore, you can’t beat the female cast. This was Melissa Sue’s feature film debut as she took time off from Little House on the Prairie to do it. She was 18 during shooting in 1980 and very beautiful (in an on-edge way), but appears at least five years older than she really was. Meanwhile Lenore Zann as Maggie is certainly a highlight and Tracey Bregman has a formidable role as the protagonist’s best friend. If you don’t remember the latter, she’s iconic of ’80-’90’s soap operas, mostly The Young and the Restless. I would give this relatively obscure slasher a higher score, but it has two glaring flaws. For one, it’s overlong by about 15-20 minutes with certain useless scenes that could’ve easily been cut with no harm done, like the brain surgery sequence. Worse, the creators changed the ending at the last minute because they thought the original was too predictable. Unfortunately, the alteration almost singlehandedly ruins the movie because it's just not believable (I’m not going to give it away). Such a climax may work for Scooby-Doo, but not a live-action story that takes place at a 'real-life' private school. The creators should've just stuck with the original ending they had in mind, predictable or not. Sure, it's "just a slasher," but even slashers have to be done in an intelligent way so that the viewer 'buys' what's happening as within the realm of plausibility. When they're not, they're eye-rolling and forgettable. Still, up till the last 12-15 minutes there’s a lot to appreciate here. The film runs 1 hour, 50 minutes, and was shot in Montreal, with Concordia University standing in for Crawford Academy, and nearby Hudson (the Wainwright manor), as well as Phoenix, New York (the town with the drawbridge), which is about 200 miles southwest of Montreal. GRADE: B-