Bloody Birthday (1981)

Directed by Ed Hunt. Starring Lori Lethin, Billy Jayne, Elizabeth Hoy, K. C. Martel, Andy Freeman, Melinda Cordell, Bert Kramer, José Ferrer, Julie Brown, Susan Strasberg, Joe Penny. [R]

As their shared birthday draws near, three little kids from the same town, born simultaneously under the bad sign of a solar eclipse, start murdering everyone in the sight because…you know, evil. The Bad Seed as a schlocky slasher, times three; it sure ain’t scary, and the gore is more discreet than average for the sub-genre, but I have to admire its dedication to its perverse vision: with something approaching precocious banality, these kids just have to scratch their itch to kill. (Mind you, many won’t admire it, but the movie’s not for pearl-clutchers in the first place.) There’s a peculiar moral knottiness to this gleeful gutter trash insofar as how gratuitous the nudity felt—a slasher flick staple, true, but, c’mon…all these “innocent” kiddies around—yet at the same time, there’s camp value in a simple clothes-change turning into a striptease show (from Julie “’Cause I’m a Blonde” Brown, no less!) while the nasty little girl collects payments from the nastier little boys for a closet-hole peep. The kid called Curtis (Jayne) easily steals the movie, cutting a far more vivid (and darkly humorous) figure than the underwritten small parts filled by the illustriously slumming likes of Susan Strasberg and Oscar-winner José Ferrer. Gerald T. Olson’s first film as producer.

50/100