Happy Birthday to Me is a great movie. A really classy, professional and yet still twisted as all hell slasher – how many of those have you seen from a big studio? Anyway, despite the quality, the film has endured more for peripheral reasons. First is the cover artwork. The original poster treads a fine line between campy and iconic, with a shish kabob being shoved down a teen’s throat with a promise of “six of the most bizarre murders you’ll ever see.” There’s also one of those really bad disclaimers about the ending being too shocking and all that. Funny stuff, and something that has always endured with the film. Then, when Columbia finally released it on DVD, we again got an infamous cover, but this of a different kind. The new cover is hilarity. It’s inexplicable. It has absolutely nothing to do with the film; it’s like one of those clichéd Hollywood big shot decisions, where they try and sell exploitables without even seeing the product. There’s a scantly clad woman with glowing orange eyes holding a knifed cake in front of a lightning struck castle. If one of the Cat People had a birthday at Dracula’s mansion, then maybe we’d be getting close to relevant, but as is the cover is certainly the biggest abomination in the history of the medium.
There was another problem with Columbia’s DVD, though. The score was all wrong. There was this incredibly cheesy “Out of the Blue” disco tune in place of the traditional score, and even all the strings were completely different. Fans balked at both the cover and the canned score, but Columbia did not listen. Five candles later, though, and Anchor Bay is now celebrating this most infamous of slasher birthday’s with the original score intact. Are they really that different? How about the audio? Any supplemental presents worth opening? Let’s carve up this fine, old-Hollywood cake.
Click here to read the full review at HORRORDIGITAL.COM
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