Forget Me Now
Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
directed by J. Lee Thompson
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
As a director with a working relationship with Gregory Peck, J. Lee Thompson seemed to share his leading man's dull earnestness. I'm basing that on The Guns of Navarone, a bloated marquee war picture, and every pic of Peck's I've seen. Psychological terror clearly interested Thompson (it had been nearly two decades since Cape Fear), and in Happy Birthday to Me he can't wait to skim the most superficial cliches of teenage misbehavior.
Mary Ingalls is friends with the hip "Top Ten," a collection of rich wastrels, who die a series of grisly, funny deaths that somehow function to draw out a memory of the stormy evening when mommy drank too much and wound up yelling at someone's nightwatchman. The trigger events are so random as to be nonsensical, like everyone hanging out in a storage room at the natatorium when one of the pals puts on a suit to swim. It takes Thompson an extra twenty minutes to catch up to what we already know about the murderer, which is ten minutes past wondering why everyone inexplicably wears gloves.
Once the movie settles on a killer, a glorious spree that includes seduction, then death, by shish kebab is brought to a halt by an eleventh hour twist clear out of some blue sky. Thompson suffers the fate of too many aging directors, which is to make us think that prolonging a scene - length alone - makes it scarier, but at least he manages to frame the heroine just before the credits roll. Such cynics, those old-timers.
directed by J. Lee Thompson
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
As a director with a working relationship with Gregory Peck, J. Lee Thompson seemed to share his leading man's dull earnestness. I'm basing that on The Guns of Navarone, a bloated marquee war picture, and every pic of Peck's I've seen. Psychological terror clearly interested Thompson (it had been nearly two decades since Cape Fear), and in Happy Birthday to Me he can't wait to skim the most superficial cliches of teenage misbehavior.
Mary Ingalls is friends with the hip "Top Ten," a collection of rich wastrels, who die a series of grisly, funny deaths that somehow function to draw out a memory of the stormy evening when mommy drank too much and wound up yelling at someone's nightwatchman. The trigger events are so random as to be nonsensical, like everyone hanging out in a storage room at the natatorium when one of the pals puts on a suit to swim. It takes Thompson an extra twenty minutes to catch up to what we already know about the murderer, which is ten minutes past wondering why everyone inexplicably wears gloves.
Once the movie settles on a killer, a glorious spree that includes seduction, then death, by shish kebab is brought to a halt by an eleventh hour twist clear out of some blue sky. Thompson suffers the fate of too many aging directors, which is to make us think that prolonging a scene - length alone - makes it scarier, but at least he manages to frame the heroine just before the credits roll. Such cynics, those old-timers.
posted by NPK at 12:01 AM
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