• Directed by Ed Hunt
• Written by Ed Hunt and Barry Pearson
• Starring
  • Lori Lethin
  • K.C. Martel
  • Elizabeth Hoy
  • Billy Jacoby
  • Andy Freeman

An irrelevant opening thought: If this movie were British, I think you’d immediately assume it to be a comedy from the title, possibly about somebody trying to avoid their birthday, or maybe get to their own birthday party. “Bloody birthday!”

But it’s not British, it’s American, and it’s not a comedy, it’s a slasheresque horror flick. And it doesn’t really revolve around a birthday — not in the way that, say, Halloween revolves around Halloween — but they couldn’t very well call it Three Murderous Little Bastitches.

On June 9, 1970, three women in Meadowvale, CA, give birth during a total eclipse. Their children are hailed as saviors and prophets because their presence heralds the rebirth of the sun.

A promotional consideration was provided by…

Wait, no, sorry, that’s some other movie involving bad tribal dancing and maybe an Italian production company. In this movie, we fast-forward to June of 1980, which will be “the present” for the rest of the movie. It’s a cruel lesson in the perils of “date-stamping” your movie, as this feature got very little mileage out of its limited release. Of course, the home video revolution was right around the corner, but I don’t think there’s been another period which would date a movie more drastically than that between the early and late ’80s, when its video release would have taken place. Try to imagine yourself as a home video renter in your mullet and primary colors, and being confronted with boys in their shag cuts and girls in their feathered-back hairdos and lace-fronted blouses.

Anyway. The three children, now classmates, are looking forward to their combined tenth birthday party. They are:

-Debbie (Elizabeth Hoy), a cute-as-a-button blonde who gets her way by showing her dimples. She also shows an awful lot of leg for a ten-year-old; I guess she’s practicing ahead on her feminine wiles.

- Curtis (Billy Jacoby), the one with glasses, so you know he’s brainy. He also likes carting around a full-sized replica handgun, back in the days before “zero tolerance” policies at school.

- Stephen (Andy Freeman), who’s… um… blond. And hangs out with the other two. Sorry, kid, but there’s only so much personality to go around during each solar eclipse, and you got the short end of the stick.

“Excuse me, but ain’t we just cuuuuute?“

The first thing you should know about these three, before you even learn their names, is that they’re murderous sumbitches. Even before we see their faces, we get to see them strangle and club a couple of teens who decided that the cemetery was the perfect place to get cuddly. Actually they decided that an open grave in the cemetery was the perfect place to get cuddly. I don’t know how you could tempt fate any more blatantly, short of dousing yourself in goat’s blood and daring Satan to whup your ass, but hey. The beginning of the ’80s was a time of experimentation and such.

Since we’ve got three clearly-defined antagonists (well, two are clearly defined and one’s just there to help carry things), I guess we need a protagonist of some sort, and that role falls to Joyce (Lori Lethin), a high-school senior with “final girl” written all over her. Her younger brother Timmy (K.C. Martel) is in the same class as the Triple Terror, she helps out at the elementary school for extra credit, and her best friend Beverly (Julie Brown – !) is Debbie’s older sister, so she’s got plenty of contact with the kids. And their mother and father are on an extended vacation for her father’s health, so there’ll be plenty of opportunity to be all vulnerable and stuff. Oh, and we’re first introduced to her as she makes an astrological chart for one of her friends; bet that’s a skill that will come in handy.

Another inherited trait of final girls, at least immediately post-Halloween, is that Joyce stays on the periphery of the plot for an awful long time. Meanwhile, the tots are going about their business: After murdering the teen couple for no discernable reason, they go after Debbie’s dad (Bert Kramer), who also happens to be the sheriff; when a skateboard on the steps fails to do him in, Steven simply bashes his head in with a baseball bat, then they blame the skateboard. Timmy just happens along right then, and as the terrible trio doesn’t know if saw anything suspicious, they arrange to play hide-and-seek with him in the junkyard and lock him in an industrial freezer, from which he luckily escapes. Next they go after Miss Davis (Susan Strasberg), their teacher (in the old-school “I want my students to dispise me” mold), shooting her with the gun that Curtis stole from Debbie’s deceased father’s gunbelt. Then because Joyce discovered the teacher’s body and because of her connection to Timmy, they lure hure to the junkyard and try to run her down with a beater car. (Neither attempted murder in the junkyard works, which probably explains why they don’t use that as a staging ground anymore.)

“Let’s see… Spare teacher? But I thought we kept the glue in here.”

Meanwhile, there are other shenanigans going on. Debbie is making some pocket money on the side by selling her two co-nativists time at the peephole into her sister Beverly’s bedroom, where the older teen spends an inordinate amount of time dancing naked while changing clothes (as we men have always instinctively known women do when we’re not around). In fact, there’s no shortage of naked teens; yet another horny couple parks their van on a suburban street for some nocturnal nookie, until Curtis prowls by with his gun, looking for an ass to cap.

Naturally, Joyce is the one who finally starts putting it all together. Not because the children are always the ones in proximity to the dead, or who had access; but because her expansive horoscope work shows that the three children all have something missing from their personalities (”Saturn was blocked,” you know — I hate it when that happens). Her suspicions are cemented — and then rendered untrustworthy — by a stunt Curtis pulls at the triple birthday party, making it look to her like he had put ant poison in the big birthday cake, then showing her to be wrong in front of the entire community. That gives the children all the leisure they need to plan Joyce’ demise…

The main strength here, and an appropriate strength it is, is the children themselves. There are two ways to make killer children creepy: One is to have them act creepy (as in Village of the Damned (1960) or Burial Ground (1981); the other is to have them act all sweetness-and-light, as child actors are trained to do, while cheerfully murdering the supporting cast. Because, honestly, who’s going to suspect a trio of tots who look like snuggly puppy dogs?

The Town That Dreaded Puberty.

The main demerits are with the way the rest of the movie unfolds, or unravels. There are leftover bits of plot scattered here and there that don’t connect to anything else, like the completely useless scene of Joyce explaining the marvels of astrology to her faculty advisor (Joe Penny, showing up for a single scene). Even more egregious is Joyce’s boyfriend. “Oh,” you ask, “she has a boyfriend?” Only sort of; he’s already off at college, so aside from a single mention in an early scene, his only presence in the movie is to show up unannounced to make out a bit with Joyce and give her an opportunity for an out-of-left-field monologue about how she doesn’t want to go to college, and how “I’m going to do what I’m going to do, not just plan what I’m going to do.” Then the boyfriend disappears back out of the story, which proceeds as before.

The producers really can’t be blamed for one of the most jarring sidetracks, though, as Beverly’s boyfriend turns out to be a young Michael Dudikoff, the American Ninja himself! I kept expecting him to team up with Joyce to solve the murders and whip out the mad karate skills at a critical juncture, but no; his main function is to show up at funerals (and there are plenty), and suck on Beverly’s face a bit.

Given the way different plot threads unravel, the resolution is surprisingly satisfying. I’ll not ruin it for you, except to tell you that it manages to be believably open-ended without becoming an obvious sequel setup or cheap “final scare” gag.

Eh. The old “arrow through the eye” gag.

As a standalone movie, then, it’s moderately successful. And it augments its score in my rankings for being a post-Halloween slasher which follows the idea from that movie of “menace in suburbia,” rather than the more obvious lure for imitators, the “unstoppable slasher in a mask” shtick.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 6
• pasty male butts: 1
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
  • Ellen Geer (”Madge”) played “Dr. Kila Marr” in the TNG episode “Silicon Avatar”
  • William Boyett (Joyce and Timmy’s dad, seen for a split second in the final scene) played “Lt. Bell” in the TNG episode “The Big Goodbye,” and the policeman in the TNG two-parter “Time’s Arrow”
  • Ward Costello (his role’s not listed, but I think he was Curtis’ grandfather) played “Admiral Quinn” in the TNG episodes “Coming of Age” and “Conspiracy”
  • Cyril O’Reilly (Lori’s boyfriend Paul) played “Nahsk” in the DS9 episode “Who Mourns For Morn?”