Bloody Birthday

'Bloody Birthday' is one of those movies that surprisingly ages well enough to remain watchable nowadays. Not a masterpiece for sure, but still entertaining and surprisingly enough, it doesn't really have a lot of unintentionally funny scenes. I know it's a shocker if we keep in mind that this is a low budget flick from the early 80s about a group of evil children who kill people. But trust me, the movie manages to remain respectable and watchable for the most part.

The story revolves around three children who are born during a a total eclipse. According to astrology, during eclipses, the sun and the moon block Saturn, which controls emotions. As a consequence, the three children who are born that day, eventually become uncaring and evil. Since they don't experience any feelings of remorse whatsoever, these 10-year-old kids gang up against basically everyone who stands in their way, including their own parents and siblings... and kill them! The body count increases day after day and the police authorities believe that there's a psychopath lurking around the place. In the meantime, Debbie, Curtis and Steven, don't hesitate to keep butchering people.

I was expecting some hilariously bad scenes, but the movie proved me wrong. True, it's not exactly what most people would consider a 'serious' horror movie, but if I have to be fair, I'd say that the story is decently executed. One of the most important reasons why one would normally expect laughable situations (like I did), it's because in these kind of movies in which the main villains are children, the young actors tend to be plain awful and they make the whole thing laughable. Let's face it: kids tend to be horrible actors, which is understandable and we can't blame them for that. But to my surprise, the three young actors who played the merciless killers in this film, looked very disturbing and not at all funny. The rest of the actors are also good and if you're a George Clooney fan, you can see his uncle playi...

Born under a bad sign

In a Southern Cal town people are dying in curious circumstances with everything pointing to some unlikely culprits.

“Bloody Birthday” (1981) mixes the killer kid genre with slasher flick and works well enough. It came out a few years before the “Children of the Corn” series started, but it’s not like there weren’t plenty of predecessors going back to the early 60s. For instance, the Star Trek TV series had two episodes with sinister children, “Miri” and “The Children Shall Lead.” Then there’s “The Brood,” which debuted a couple years earlier.

Elizabeth Hoy (Debbie) and Billy Jayne (Curtis) are particularly effective as the diabolical offspring. Meanwhile Julie Brown stands out on the feminine front as Beverly with a memorable scene reminiscent of Tom Cruise in “Risky Business” (1983), if you know what I mean. As far as the protagonist goes, Lori Lethin is winsome as Joyce with her Dorothy Hamill hairdo.

There are a couple of memorable scenes, like Timmy locked in the metal cabinet and the junkyard sequence.

The movie runs 1 hour, 25 minutes, and was shot in Glendale, California, which borders Los Angeles to the north and is east of Burbank.

GRADE: B-