Happy Birthday to Me—the rare birthday party where the cake comes with a side of decapitation, and your guests leave a little less alive than they arrived. J. Lee Thompson, usually known for more respectable fare, decided to trade in subtlety for scalpels, giving us a slasher film that’s part high school melodrama, part extreme home renovation (with corpses).
Melissa Sue Anderson—yes, the same wholesome “Little House on the Prairie” Laura—transforms from square-jawed innocence to homicidal high school queen in a performance that makes you wonder if growing up really should involve turning everyone around you into barbecue skewers. She’s unrecognizable, which is exactly the point: Ginny is a whirlwind of trauma-fueled rage and repressed memories, stabbing her way through the elite Top Ten clique as if she’s auditioning for Murder, She Wrote: High School Edition.
The plot is gloriously convoluted, taking a chain of increasingly ridiculous murders—motorcycle scarves, garden shears, shish kebabs—as seriously as a Shakespearean tragedy. The killers’ logic is so airtight that it could inspire a thesis: “How to Weaponize Your Teenage Friends and Get Away With It.” Every death is an opportunity for elaborate staging, and the film gleefully leans into it, letting the audience squirm while simultaneously marveling at the ingenuity of killing someone with a birthday cake.
And the twist? Oh, the twist: two Ginnys, one knife, and a whole lot of family secrets. It’s like Psycho had a drunken Canadian cousin who thought, “Why not add more people, more corpses, and maybe a drawbridge accident?” The climax is a delirious ballet of blood, masks, and family drama so overwrought that you can’t help but admire the audacity. J. Lee Thompson doesn’t just make you scream; he makes you laugh, squirm, and question why you ever thought high school was safe.
The supporting cast is a parade of either doomed teenagers or hapless adults who wander into the wrong rooms at the wrong time, which, frankly, is a public service: showing that poor life choices inevitably lead to horrifying deaths if you’re unlucky enough to be in a Canadian drawbridge town. Glenn Ford’s Dr. Faraday, part creepy scientist, part unhelpful therapist, meets a fate that’s both satisfying and morally uncomplicated—you never liked him anyway, right?
Shot across Montreal and upstate New York, the movie’s locations oscillate between idyllic prep school grounds and foggy, foreboding cemeteries, giving the film a weirdly elegant veneer that makes every grisly death feel like a tragic art installation. And while the pacing occasionally falters under its own ambition, every wobble is redeemed by the inventiveness of the murder set pieces.
Financially, the movie didn’t exactly bankrupt Columbia Pictures, and it grossed just enough to prove that people will pay to watch a teenage birthday party devolve into carnage. Critically, it’s a mixed bag—but those critics clearly underestimated the sheer joy of seeing a drawbridge accident, a garden shear to the gut, and a shish kebab throat impalement all in one evening. It’s like the film whispered, “You wanted slasher clichés? I’ll give you slasher clichés—on steroids, with extra icing.”
In the end, Happy Birthday to Me is a gleefully unhinged carnival of teenage privilege, repressed trauma, and creative homicidal imagination. Darkly humorous, occasionally absurd, and yet impossible to ignore, it’s the sort of film that makes you grateful you didn’t attend an elite prep school—or at least that your friends weren’t as inventive as Ginny. Birthdays may come and go, but in this universe, they come with knives, masks, and unresolved parental drama. Bon appétit.
