As we continue with my annual attempts to catch up with as many 2017 horror movies as possible before the end of the year, we come to Happy Death Day, another one of the films I saw in October just before I got seriously sidetracked. Seeing it a week before my birthday was just an ironic coincidence.
'Tree' Gelbman wakes up on her birthday in a college dorm room after a drunken party the previous night. Starting with that and a Walk of Shame back to her sorority house, Tree proceeds to be a condescending and self-centered bitch to everyone, from her roommate to her father. So it's probably no surprise that she ends up murdered that night by a killer wearing a baby-face mask. What is surprising is that, after being killed, she wakes up again on the morning of her birthday to repeat the same events. No matter what she does, however, she still gets killed (usually) by the masked killer before the end of the day. Apparently trapped in this time loop with no way out, Tree's only option appears to be to try to find out the identity of her killer and live through the entire day...
Happy Death Day is very much a 'teen' horror movie, and boy oh boy did it do its best to remind me of that throughout the film. Now, I know I'm not exactly the target audience for teen horror, but I like to think that I at least try to meet the film halfway, rather than just doing the review equivalent of yelling, "Get off my lawn!" at it. But the characters in Happy Death Day really did make me feel crotchety. Take Tree, for example (and what sort of a name is 'Tree' anyway - no, enough with the old grumpiness, and anyway it's short for Teresa). For the first third of the film, she's thoroughly unlikeable... but as she keeps reliving the same day, she learns and grows as a person. Typical protagonist's journey stuff. At least that's how the movie wants it to go. She still annoyed me greatly, mainly because of her dialogue (more on that shortly). And most of the rest of the film's characters were little more than stereotypes, and borderline offensive ones at that (I'm looking at you, in-denial gay man!)
Happy Death Day was written by Scott Lobdell, a comic book writer who was huge in the 1990s with his work on several X-Men titles, including Generation X. He was beloved back then, but in recent years his star has fallen somewhat - one example would be the controversy over the way he portrayed Starfire in the DC comic Red Hood and the Outlaws, which quite a few people had problems with for... reasons. Personally, I found much of the teen/young adult dialogue in the film to be awkward and forced (as a reference, I tried to think of my two nieces, both in their early-to-mid-20s, speaking in a similar way and couldn't recall any time when they had), as though the writer had once had an idea of how "those kids today" talk, but ended up overcompensating for it and ramping the slang up to 11.
The mystery of who the killer is, however, is surprisingly well done. I had been slightly worried that I had figured out the killer's identity from the trailer, which would have been a new record for me, but no, it really was someone I hadn't really considered for much of the film. On the other hand, there was a short portion of the film where I got quite angry, thinking that Happy Death Day had just pulled a convenient killer out of nowhere to cover its ass, but that turned out to be a red herring.
The comparison to Groundhog Day is obvious (not only is the film described as "Groundhog Day meets Scream" but the former film is even referenced at the end as a little meta-joke), and the film is most definitely a horror-comedy... with more of an emphasis on the comedy than the horror. It's another PG-13 horror movie, with practically no gore whatsoever - and most of what there is gets dialled down to as bloodless a level as possible or played for laughs. In the end, it's a competent enough movie, but it's probably going to disappoint a lot of horror fans who go to see it for the sparsity of horror elements.
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