A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

The set-up for this monumentally useless slasher-lite drivel centers around three children who are born in the same hospital during an eclipse, a serendipitous occurrence which results in them growing up without a conscience. As their tenth birthdays approach, the trio of youngsters apparently spontaneously decide to go on a killing spree, whittling down parents, siblings, teachers, and random canoodling teens in a variety of unimaginative and unimpressive ways.The clumsy staging of the murders is signaled from the opening scene, when two amorous dimwits meet their ends after climbing into an open grave to have sex (the lass is modest, and while she has no reservations about getting down in a cemetery, she feels exposed out in the open, thus the novel change of scenery). This silly intro sets the stage for the 85 minutes of tedious and ludicrous shenanigans which unfold while we watch the malevolent moppets go about their brutal business without any of the clueless adults in the film ever becoming suspicious. The parental ignorance might be believable if the killer kids exercised any tact, but when they repeatedly smash one of the fathers in the head with a baseball bat and his wife readily accepts their explanation that his (gruesome, one would imagine) injuries occurred when he fell down a flight of four stairs, the plot begins to spiral into absurdity.Despite the sanguinary bounty advertised in the title, Bloody Birthday may well be the most tepid offering of the era. Only a single arrow to the eye gag even registers a blip on the gore meter, and the majority of the paltry homicidal handiwork occurs off-screen. The overall presentation is so tame and pedestrian that the film is more on par with the After School Specials which were being cranked out at this time, so if your looking for a hidden gem in the '80s slasher canon you most assuredly aren't going to find one here.Save for a few sequences of gratuitous nudity, the only marginally amusing aspects of Bloody Birthday are the presences of a couple of the decade's semi-icons. Future B-action regular Michael Dudikoff turns up in a couple of scenes to make out with MTV host-to-be Julie Brown and stand in a few funeral assemblies with a blankly morose look on his face. Anyone who actually remembers who Brown is will undoubtedly be delighted to witness the extended strip tease she performs for herself, so if seeing her naked is on your bucket list, this outing admittedly delivers mightily on that front.The biggest problems here are the prepubescent executioners, who are undoubtedly the least imposing genre villains ever presented. The most vicious of the bunch is a bespectacled sociopath who strongly resembles Skippy from "Family Ties" and even though he seems to possess the inhuman ability to fire a handgun that weighs as much as he does without experiencing any sort of recoil, the goofy grin he displays while he busts his caps offsets any sort of menace his massive weapon conjures up.It takes no less than three failed murder attempts on the one shrewd classmate who figures out the remorseless bunch is up to no good for our diminutive hero's older sister to finally step up and offer her assistance. This leads us into the film's flaccid climax, where the band of grade-school slayers stalk the interloping duo but merit themselves an epic fail. One of the predators is subdued when a bowl of water is thrown in his face, while Skippy Junior simply runs out of bullets and gets beat up.Only the lone girl in the crew uses her wiles to escape capture, and her mother (head still firmly inserted into her own backside, evidently) sneaks her away from the scene and flees town with her. The movie's coda reveals that mom and daughter remain at large after changing their names and that the lethal little girl has claimed another victim, thus setting the stage for Bloody Birthday 2, which was fortunately never excreted.This tripe also loses points for its derivative score, which blatantly lifts music from Friday The 13th in a feeble attempt to give the murders some sort of impact. Good idea, but when the most intense scenes involve a flaxen-haired fifth-grader hiding in cupboards to choke people with a jump rope, screeching violins are a pale substitute for actual shocks.I don't fault anyone who holds this cheap time-waster in high esteem; after all, I have certainly given pieces of my heart to plenty of atrocious movies. But since the lack of gore nudges Bloody Birthday out of the "Splatter" category and the absence of anything resembling suspense makes even the "Horror" designation a stretch, I'm really not sure how to classify this one. Is "Utter Crap" considered a genre?

I saw this movie years ago and completely forgot about it, the only thing I remembered was that some kid gets locked in a horrible rusty fridge in a junkyard. Needless to say I eventually rediscovered itand found that I still loved it, it's my favourite horror to feature killer kids, and I think it more than compensates for what it lacks(its main annoyances for me being lack of blood and gore, and seriously anaemic prose) with a great atmosphere, and eerily effective use of its premise. It has a great and memorably foreboding score. Theme tunes is key with any 80's horror movie worth its salt. A lot of the other bold music themes used in it aren't all that good though. What makes evil children pictures interesting is that the children are often doing incredibly bad and twisted stuff that they're not supposed to, and there's a fascination and revulsion to that. When you take something fundamentally innocent and twist it to the point where it's completely removed from what it's supposed to be, when you have the child that seems so angelic but it's really a facade, it's creepy. And it makes you wonder, does this happen? Can kids really do this? Well as we all know, sadly yes. The image in this film of the kid brandishing a gun might not have meant anything back in 1981, but I find it quite disturbing in its echoes of modern times. I believe that certain elements of this film have never been more relevant or frightening. The acting wasn't all that bad. The girl next door heroine Lori Lethin and K.C.Martel as her cocky little brother were pretty good. I remember him from that scene in Amityville where he gets his fingers crushed by the window. I also thought Melinda Cordell as Debbie's unaware (and perhaps by the end fully aware) mother was very good and moving in a couple of her emotional scenes. And I thought the dearly departed lady who played the teacher did a good job with her small role, of conveying a woman thoroughly p***ed-off with her life! A few of the dramatic scenes were very well done. One little scene I find quite moving is the one right after the second rather jarring funeral. I'm something of a believer in astrology. If the moon can drag entire oceans and create tides, why can't all those grand stars and planets and moons affect living things as well? Doesn't seem all that far out of the realms of possibility to me. Okay, perhaps not this degree! Of the three kids I really liked Elizabeth Hoy as Debbie the best. I found her to be by far the most effectively unnerving. She wasn't necessarily a better actor than the other two but there was something she brought of herself, her persona, with the cold expressions and big crazy hair, that really gave her a sense of otherness that you would expect from a kid that's supposed to have no soul. I found Billy Jayne as the killer nerd with the glasses fairly boring, only ever really scary or interesting when armed with his gun, which he somehow looked good with! He went on to have the most successful career of them all. Oh, and the blonde boy was simply pathetic. He was just a complete nonentity, I don't know what they were thinking when they choose him. We got patricide AND sororicide in the same movie! Even though most of the killings are annoyingly bloodless, to me they're still well done and shocking. The violence seems real, and doesn't go as far as the violence you see now, and that's what makes it powerful, because it seems real. The murder I find most horrifying is when the girl lures her own father to his death. Her reptilian smirk as he is dispatched is truly chilling. What's scarier than your own kid being the one you should be most afraid of? Happy Bloody Birthday...

This "movie" made me want to puke on my own feet. The kids are just awful, they are more like demons than children. I'm not a violent person, but I wanted to take each one of those "kids" to a back alley and work them over with my fists and a few other people's fists. There is no excuse for the content of this film. It's just nasty. Plenty of nudity in a movie with kids that's obviously for adults. SICK. As I watched the "film", I wondered why I didn't just turn it off. These kids were so rotten that you almost had to watch even though you didn't want to. I would not suggest that a cat who is blind and deaf watch this.

***SPOILERS*** With the exception of veteran actors Jose Ferrer and Susan Strasberg as the doctor and teacher the cast of the pre-teenage or midget horror flick "Bloody Birthday" is made up of mostly unknowns. Still it packs quite a wallop in having a trio of sweet and innocent looking just about to be 10 year old adolescents go on a murder spree that would rival those of the likes of real life adult serial murders like Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz!The three little psychos Debbie Curtis & Steven, Elizabeth Hoy Billy Jayne & Andy Freeman, were all born at the exact same time, June 9,1970, when there was a triple conjunction of the Sun Moon and planet Saturn! Were told by Joyce Russel, Lori Lethin, who did the three's horoscope that the planet Saturn controls a person emotions Which by that planet being blocked out of the picture or the zodiac left the three little "darlins" without any human emotions at all! For some reason not explained at all in the movie it's their soon to be 10th birthday that's to set something off in their disturbed minds and have them graduate into full fledged psycho killers! And that day is less then a week away!Nowhere as gory as most slasher films released in the 1970's and 1980's "Bloody Birthday" is far more disturbing in that the killers in it Debbi Curtis & Steven are barley out of their diapers when they commit their horrific crimes! Some against their own family members! It's one of their classmates Timmy Russel,K.C Mantel, Joyce's kid brother who uncovers just what the three are up to. That's when they tricked Timmy into locking himself in a refrigerator at the local junk yard that almost ended up suffocating him.After murdering almost a half dozen people Timmy finally convinced Joyce that the three were up to no good when they turned their attention on her as well. To make thing even worse one of the little rascals the smirking and gun totting Curtis, who handles a Magnum revolver as skillfully as Dirty Harry, tricked her into thinking he poisoned the three's birthday cake that made Joyce look like a raving lunatic when he tried to stop everyone at the birthday party from eating it! ***SPOILERS*** With only Joyce and Timmy standing in their way in preventing them from wiping out the entire peaceful little town of Meadovale Calif. the three killers move in on them as they try to get help which is not to come with the phone wires in the house being cut by the trio! That has both Joyce and Timmy left on their own to fend for themselves against a ruthless and determined bunch of psychos who'll stop at nothing to keep the two from revealing the truth of what they did and are still planning to do!