Happy Birthday To Me Full Movie 1981

[Janne Evers]

HappyBirthday to Me is a 1981 slasher film directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Melissa Sue Anderson and Glenn Ford. Its plot revolves around six brutal murders occurring around a popular high school senior's birthday.

Virginia "Ginny" Wainwright is a pretty and popular high school senior at Crawford Academy, a member of the school's "Top Ten," an elite clique of the most privileged and popular students. Each night, the group meets at the Silent Woman Tavern, a local pub. One night en route to the tavern, Bernadette O'Hara is attacked in her car by an unseen assailant. She struggles and plays dead to catch the killer off-guard before running to get help. She then runs into an unseen individual whom she is familiar with and begs for help, but the person slashes her neck with a straight razor.

The Top Ten becomes concerned when Bernadette fails to arrive at the pub. Upon leaving, the group sees the nearby drawbridge raising and decide to play a game of chicken. Ginny is pushed into a car by Ann Thomerson, and each of the group attempt to cross the bridge as it raises; the car Ginny is in barely clears the bridge, crashing as it meets the other side. Distraught, Ginny runs home, stopping at her mother's grave in an adjacent cemetery. At her home, Etienne, a Top Ten member, breaks into Ginny's room and steals her underwear.

Bernadette fails to show up at school the following day. Ginny, who is plagued by repressed memories, visits her on-call psychiatrist, Dr. Faraday, with whom she previously underwent an experimental brain tissue restoration procedure after surviving a harrowing accident at the drawbridge. As Ginny attempts to resume her normal life, her fellow Top Ten members are murdered in vicious and violent ways: Etienne is strangled when his scarf gets thrown into the spokes of his motorcycle, and Greg's neck is crushed in his room while lifting weights. Ann and Ginny go to Alfred's house as he has been acting odd lately and discovers he is an elaborate prosthetic make up artist with a creepy replica of Bernadette's head.

One night, Alfred, a Top Ten member who is infatuated with Ginny, follows her to her mother's grave. In retaliation, she stabs him with a pair of garden shears. On the weekend of Ginny's 18th birthday, her father leaves for a business trip. After a school dance, Ginny invites Steve to her house and prepares shish kebabs. While the two are drinking wine and smoking marijuana, Ginny begins to feed Steve with the kebab, but violently shoves the skewer down his throat.

Ann arrives at Ginny's house the following morning and finds Ginny taking a shower. In the shower, Ginny has a flashback of her mother's death: Her mother, a newly inducted socialite, invites the Top Ten to Ginny's birthday celebration four years earlier and is concerned when no guests have arrived. After being questioned by her mother, Ginny tearfully mentions the group are attending a party Ann is having instead. Humiliated, her mother drives drunk to the Thomasons' house with Ginny, where she is denied entry by Mr. Thomason's gatekeeper. Enraged and upset, she attempts to drive across a raising drawbridge, causing their car to fall into the water. Pinned beneath the steering wheel, Ginny's mother drowns. Ginny, however, manages to swim to safety.

Paranoid that she may be murdering her friends during blackout episodes, Ginny visits Dr. Faraday. When she confronts him over the procedure she underwent, he is evasive, and she murders him with a fireplace poker. Mr. Wainright returns home during a thunderstorm for Ginny's birthday and finds a pool of blood in Ginny's bedroom. He flees hysterically and finds one of Ginny's friends, Amelia, standing in the yard in what seems to be a state of shock, clutching a wrapped gift. In the cemetery, he discovers his late wife's grave was robbed, with Dr. Faraday's corpse lying beside it.

Mr. Wainright notices a light on inside the family's guest cottage. Inside, he finds the bodies of each member of the Top Ten seated at a table alongside his dead wife's corpse. He then sees Ginny enter the room with a birthday cake, singing "Happy Birthday" to herself, seeming to have lost her mind. Ginny's father cries. Ginny suddenly slashes her father's throat. He dies, failing to notice another girl is seated at the table with her head down. Ginny then goes toward the girl, who also appears to be Ginny. As the seated Ginny wakes, the murderous Ginny we have seen throughout the film yells that she did it all for her, as she ruined her last party. Suddenly the two Ginnys struggle and the other girl is revealed as Ann, who has disguised herself as Ginny with an elaborate latex mask probably made by Alfred. Ann removes the mask, ranting and raving about her father's affair with Ginny's mother and how it destroyed her family. Ann reveals that she and Ginny are half-sisters and it's all her fault. Ginny manages to wrestle the knife from Ann and stabs her to death. As she stands over Ann's corpse holding the bloodied knife, a police officer enters the cottage and says, "What have you done?"

Although it seems to have been directly influenced by the success of Friday the 13th and Prom Night, pre-production on Happy Birthday to Me had started before those films had been released, which more than hints that the huge success of Halloween was perhaps more of an influence (although the Grand Guignol elements of Friday the 13th may also have contributed).[5]

The specialized genre website Retro Slashers has a copy of the script purporting to be a third draft from April 1980, where the major difference is that Virginia is actually the killer, possessed by the spirit of her deceased mother. Although this ending logistically makes more sense than the ending that was filmed, the filmmakers thought that what was originally scripted was not climactic enough. Still, the majority of the film does point to this original ending, which indicates the switch came well into production. This version of the script also features a good number of scenes that were either never shot or rewritten, including some that show more clearly Alfred's love for Virginia and Virginia's difficult relationship with her father. The script was completely reworked by screenwriting team Timothy Bond and Peter Jobin before production started.[5]

Actress Melissa Sue Anderson, who had garnered childhood fame for her portrayal of Mary Ingalls on the television series Little House on the Prairie, was cast in the film's lead, marking her major feature debut.[6] Lisa Langlois auditioned for the role of Ann, but the role went to Tracey Bregman instead.[7]

Happy Birthday to Me began shooting in early July 1980 with British director J. Lee Thompson, famous for the classic Cape Fear (1962).[8] Thompson had also been a dialogue coach to Alfred Hitchcock years before. Thompson had actively been looking to direct a thriller, and became attached to Happy Birthday to Me. In the press material for the film, he stated: "What attracted me to this script was that the young people stood out as vivid, individual characters. The difference between a good chiller and exploitative junk, at least in my opinion, is whether or not you care about the victims".[3]

Jack Blum, who played Alfred in the film, said that Thompson took the film seriously. Thompson would later direct the Charles Bronson thriller 10 to Midnight (1983), which featured more exploitative material than Happy Birthday to Me. Hollywood actor Glenn Ford was less-than-thrilled to be in a slasher film. Apparently Ford was unpleasant on the set.

The film's make-up effects were done by special effects guru Tom Burman (who replaced Stphan Dupuis just three weeks before the cameras were due to start rolling). Dupuis later did the duties on another bigger budget Canadian slasher, Visiting Hours (1982), but left the production for undisclosed reasons. Ironically, in an issue of Fangoria from 1981, Burman criticizes the level of gore in films at that time. Director Thompson became known for tossing buckets of blood about on the set of the film to increase the on-screen gore. According to producer John Dunning, with the assistance of special effects man Tom Burman, Thompson "would be splashing blood all over the place".[9]

Happy Birthday to Me finished filming in September 1980. Much of it was shot in and around Loyola College in Montreal, while the drawbridge scenes were actually filmed in Phoenix, New York, just outside Syracuse.[2] The producers found it difficult to find the right bridge closer to the main production, as the expansion of the Highway system had made them increasingly rare. The whole town of Phoenix came to watch the dangerous stunts, where a total of fifteen cars were junked, and one stunt driver was hospitalized with two broken ankles. The bridge itself has since been removed and replaced by a bridge farther to the north. Additional photography occurred on the campuses of Concordia University and McGill University.[10]

The Motion Picture Association of America originally granted Happy Birthday to Me an X rating, resulting in Columbia truncating some of its gorier sequences in order to allow for an R rating.[13]

Columbia Pictures acquired Happy Birthday to Me for $3.5 million, following Paramount Pictures' lead with buying Friday the 13th the year before. Columbia reportedly put as much money into promoting the film as it cost to make. The promotional materials for the film boasted its numerous unusual death sequences as "six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see".[2] The theatrical poster featured sub-taglines reading: "John will never eat shish kebab again" and "Steven will never ride a motorcycle again", despite the fact that there is no character named "John" in the film, while Steven is the character who dies by a shish kekab; Etienne is the character who suffers a death via a motorcycle.[2][3]

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