Bloody Birthday (1981)

Written by Jennifer Manriquez, Editor-In-Chief, Paddy Jack Press

A spoiler-free review!

I enjoyed The Other so much, I thought I would do an entire retro series on "killer kids." Everything I can find from the 80s and before. So, here we go with Bloody Birthday. It’s a 1981 horror flick that combines Village of the Damned with Day of the Triffids. There’s an eclipse, and the three babies born in this one hospital, in this one city, during this freaky eclipse, become killers right before they turn 10. Why? Who knows? It’s a mind-numbingly flimsy premise, but it’s easy to shrug off because the film is just so much fun! 

We start with the kids just a few days before their tenth birthday, which they all celebrate together every year for some reason. Much like the kids in Village of the Damned, they seem unusually bonded, always around each other, always traveling in a pack. They aren’t family, but to an outsider they seem like they are. They can communicate with each other using only nods and glances. And, while there’s no indication that they are communicating telepathically, they always seem to know what the others are doing or planning. 

The kinder-killer trio consists of two boys, Steven and Curtis, and one girl, Debbie. Steven is blond and is several times seen wearing a denim vest and jeans get-up that transports me right back to my elementary school yearbook, where that same outfit can be seen ad nauseum. He’s a little blond terror, who doesn’t say much, but seems to act as more of a henchman, leaving the clever strategizing up to Debbie and Curtis. 

Speaking of Curtis, Curtis wears glasses. That’s how you know he can figure out anything having to do with electronics. They’re those fake glasses from old movies with the flat lens in them, which I’ve always found really distracting, but I get it. How else would I know that he’s smart if he wasn’t wearing them?

And that brings us to Debbie. Debbie’s my favorite of the three. First of all, my mom’s name is Debbie. Secondly, Debbie has fluffy blond ponytails and a face full of freckles, which are both flawlessly tied together by her cute, little upturned nose. She’s a darling kid, but the eyes. She has dark, beady eyes that she can squint together to make her entire countenance change from “cute kid” to “evil kid” in a nanosecond. Debbie is clearly the ringleader of the crew. She rarely gets her hands dirty. She lets the boys do most of the work, and when they get caught, she starts yelling, “Stop! Stop!” Debbie is an evil mastermind.

I watched this movie on the Shudder channel and was a touch hesitant when the description stated that the film “contains violence and gore.” I’m a huge horror fan, but believe or not, I tend to eschew gore. It’s not my favorite thing. I can handle the average smattering of blood and guts, but I hate that torture-y stuff. So, I was admittedly a touch nervous. But it turns out the “violence” and the “gore” are nothing more gruesome than what you might see on an episode of Knot’s Landing. What the description should have said is, “contains lots and lots of titties.” So many boobs in this movie. And butts. And even some frontsies. There’s a lot of making out, with closeups on nipples. And, everytime you see this, one of the kids is watching! Debbie likes to charge a quarter to let the boys watch her sister (played by 80s-icon, Julie Brown) undress. The “undressing,” however, turns out to be more of a striptease, wherein Julie slowly takes off her underwear while dancing around her bedroom, then inexplicably puts on pants and a shirt, with no underwear, afterward. To quote the musical, Bye Bye Birdie, “KIDS! I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today.”

In addition to Julie Brown, I recognized a handful of other faces as well. Curtis is played by Billy Jacoby, whom 80s kids might remember as the perverted younger brother of cross-dressing-for-equal-rights Terry in Just One of the Guys. The older sister of one of the trio’s playmates (a kid named Timmy that they’re always trying to murder) also played the doomed older sister in The Day After. Remember the gal who runs out of her family’s bunker and goes skipping through the fallout screaming that it’s a beautiful day, gets chased down by Steve Guttenberg, and later dies from radiation poisoning? Yeah, that’s her. Her name is Lori Lethin, and IMDB said she did all of her own stunts in Bloody Birthday, but there are a couple of shots where a car is chasing her through a junkyard that I’m pretty sure weren’t her. The linebacker-shoulders and the bad wig kind of gave it away. Timmy is played by K.C. Martel, whom you might remember as Eddie, from the comedy duo of “Eddie and Boner,” on Growing Pains. 

There are some genuine cringe-worthy moments in this flick, especially if you were a kid in the 80s. Remember the "Refrigerator Scare?" It was an urban legend about a kid hiding in an old refrigerator and not being able to get out. So, that’s how we all knew never to shut ourselves into a refrigerator. This was a genuine fear that each and every one of us had back then! Bloody Birthday played on that fear by locking a kid in a refrigerator. This scene probably doesn’t play as particularly scary to modern audiences, but the 80s-kid in me clinched up her butthole real tight. Ack!

Overall, I really enjoyed this movie. It’s got a handful of cringe-y moments and a heaping helping of 80s kitsch. Plus, if this interests you, a lot of boobies. I’ll definitely watch it again, and I sincerely hope Joe Bob Briggs will include it in a future episode of The Last Drive-In on the Shudder channel. Go watch it!