Happy Birthday to Me

Good movie, but the DVD...
Hollywood is a tough town. All one need do is look at the career of J. Lee Thompson to prove this statement. This is the guy who directed "Cape Fear," not the remake with Nolte and De Niro but the frightening original with Peck and Mitchum. As the years went by things began to turn south for Thompson. Things got so bad that he ended up directing pictures for Cannon, the company that churned out all of those low budget, ultraconservative shoot 'em action films in the 1980s with the likes of Chuck Norris, Michael Dudikoff, and Charles Bronson in the lead roles. In fact, Thompson and Bronson worked together on several of these potboilers, including "10 to Midnight," "Death Wish 4: The Crackdown," and "Kinjite: Forbidden Secrets." By the time Thompson passed away in 2002, only critics remembered him for his earlier, more important efforts. But Thompson made another crucial contribution to American film, specifically American horror films, when he lensed the 1981 slasher flick "Happy...

Cry blasphemy!!
I, like every horror movie enthusiast, eagerly awaited the arrival of "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME" on DVD. After repeated viewings, I've grown to appreciate this early predecessor to Wes Craven's "SCREAM". That film gave absolutely no credit to this as being one of the rare horror films that redefined the many plot twists, in-jokes and even a few red herrings so popular now in this genre. Now, Columbia/TriStar did the unthinkable: they completely ditched the chilling Lance Rubin/Bo Harwood score in favor of a pointless, even cliched new score. How bad is it? They even play a mock-Olivia Newton-John song to run in the opening credits!!!

How dare they?! This film had one of the finest scores for any horror film and then some! Did Columbia/TriStar completely assume that we, the smart buying public, wouldn't notice? Or did they have so little faith in the buying power of this film, that they decided to take us for idiots!!

I accepted the cheesy "girl posing with a knife in...

Pray you're not invited to the party...
If you've seen this film before, and recently purchased the DVD release, popped it into your player, and got the creeping feeling of something being not quite right, you're not alone... the movie on this disc is not the same as when originally released as the studio releasing this film to DVD has changed some of the musical scoring (substituting an inappropriate disco-like score in some parts)...I'm having the strangest sense of déjà vu...oh wait, a similar thing was done on the recent DVD release of Return of the Living Dead II (different studio). Seems kind of sad that for what has to be one of the biggest markets for DVDs (the United States), you'd think companies could see fit to try and preserve the original elements of a film, rather than changing it (for whatever reason), releasing it (without any warnings or notice of change on the packaging), and slapping a hefty price tag on the box (this DVD is one of the more expensive one's I've seen in awhile)...

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