 And welcome to today's special edition of Freightfully Forgotten, because it's going to be Canada Day weekend here in Canada. So we're going to do a special Canadian horror movie for you guys. First, what are we drinking today? Uh, actually, there's no name for this. Oh. Today for Canada Day, we are going to be talking about the Canadian horror movie, Happy Birthday to Me, which came out in 1981. It is directed by Jay Lee Thompson, and he's directed lots of movies, but most notable of all the movies he's ever directed is Death Wish 4. The Crack Down. Ha, ha, ha, ha. He also directed the original 1960s Cape Fear. The movie stars Melissa Sue Anderson. She was in Little House on the Prairie. Tracy Bregman was in this. She was in Allie's soap operas. Like every soap opera. Yeah, basically. So the movie starts off like a typical 1980s slasher movie. Girl is leaving her dorm. She runs into one of the teachers. Old bitch walking her dog named Winston, his asshole dog. You know, all you guys spend too much time in the local pub. If you spend as much time studying, you would be in Harvard by now. She ends up being attacked by an unseen assailant, very Halloween-ish, where she gets kind of strangled in this car, does the smart thing, and she plays dead, goes limp, bolts. It's you. And then, boo, she gets a straight razor right to the throat. Her friends, who are waiting for her to show up in the local pub, very annoyed by a whole table of these drunken Shriners. 99 bottles of beer in a wall. Who sings that? I've never seen or heard anyone in real life sing that song. Then they want to do it again one more time. So they all hop in your vehicles. There's a bet they have to jump the bridge as the bridge is going up to, like, let a boat across. And they do it, and they make it. But the guy wrecks his fucking car in the process. It's super nose-dive, and just shh. Yeah, did some nice car. That's a beautiful car. And they're all happy that they made the jump. Yeah, OK. I'd be pissed off that I wrecked my car. I'd say my fucking car. This jump over the bridge sparked some flashbacks in our main character, whose name is Ginny. Her and her mother were in a car accident on that bridge, and her mother actually drowned. She's blacked out some of these memories due to trauma. Now they're coming back. Now Ginny's back at school watching some motorcycle race with her friends. Super French asshole guy riding his motorcycle. He goes back to his garage and starts fixing up his bike. And somebody shows up. We don't know who. He starts the motorcycle, and the killer puts his scarf into the moving wheel, and his head goes into the wheel and dies. There's another one of their friends, a muscle man. He's lifting weights, and oh, it's you. Hi. All these kids know this person. Put another 10 pounds on each side. You see the gloves again doing it. He super struggles, too, to lift it off. And he's like, hey, what are you doing? Put it back. He's all sweating and everything. Take a big weight. You see his balls? He just drops it. Ah, it just comes right down on his neck. Ginny, she's kind of feeling sad, I guess, about her mother. She goes to the cemetery. He's kind of following her because I think he kind of has the hots for her a little bit. He reaches into his pocket to grab something. She turns around and stabs him. All he had was a flower in his hand. Yeah, there's a disco. And it's funny because this is 81, but it's still the 70s, right? There's still disco going on. Steve and Ginny get a little close at the dance. They go back to Ginny's house, and she all makes them these nice shish kebabs and everything with all these vegetables and good hunks and meat and stuff on it. That's no snack. That's a meal. Shish kebabs are a lot of work. Yeah, it's not a fucking bowl of chips here. They start kissing and my ass is burning from the fire that they're sitting beside. She sort of starts feeding him shish kebab and she just jams it right down his fucking throat. And that's the infamous movie poster. Yeah, exactly. Her friend Ann comes over. She throws the keys from the window there. No, let yourself in. You know, I'm going to take a quick shower. She kind of almost blacks out. When she comes to, she sees Ann dead in the tub with her throat cut. She ends up getting in contact with her doctor, her psychiatrist who's been helping her through all this stuff, shows her that there is no dead body. She's just been imagining all of this stuff. She ends up clubbing him in the head and brutally to her, my dad. There's a lot of blood. Yeah, there's quite a lot. Her dad comes home from a business trip. He finds the scene. In the process of trying to find Ginny ends up finding this summer house. There's all of Ginny's friends situated around this big table ready to celebrate her birthday. And if you want to see what happens with Ginny, wizard dad, keep watching. There's not one twist ending. There's not two. There's actually, if you really want to count them, there's three twists at the end. Another neat thing too about the movie is the motive, original, and kind of convoluted. Something that Scream, I think may have stolen, is the real motive for the killing. That point about the movie is that maybe it's a tattoo long. It's pretty less two hours long. Probably cut down to about an hour and a half, easy. Yeah, I think so. Cause there's a lot of plot points that kind of don't really go anywhere. It's still pretty good. Like it's a pretty original movie at that time. You can tell that they're kind of trying to capitalize on the whole special date movies. My Bloody Valentine, Happy Birthday to Me. Right. Friday the 13th, you know, that type of thing. At its heart, this movie is really kind of like a who done it, good misdirection. Every character has a motive. Every character has some weird kind of cork. It keeps you guessing the whole way through. When Jimmy stabs that Arnie Cunningham looking guy and you find out that she's the killer, you're still kind of like, oh, but is she? Elude to so many other people. It could be any one of them in the whole group. And there's a lot of characters in this movie. More so than most slasher movies. Yeah, and the character building in this movie is really good. They really took their time to develop all the relationships in this movie. You never see this anymore. No, no. And like, even with like, for example, Friday the 13th, not much development. No. You know, so it's pretty original. The kills are great. Oh yeah. And the effects are great. The way the killer kills, every kill is so original. He uses his hobby or like against them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The motorcycle guy is death by motorcycle. The weightlifting guy is death by weight. It's pretty cool. The music for this movie is really good too. And it's not your 80s synth type music. No. This is more of a traditional orchestral score, big and epic. And it really adds to every scene tremendously. If you want a good Canadian who-done-it slasher to watch on Canada Day weekend, whether you're Canadian or not, please check out Happy Birthday to Me. Great kills, good effects, good Canadian film that luckily doesn't look Canadian. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it doesn't have that CBC feel to it. No, it looks pretty good. It's a pro-looking movie. So we did goodbye this one. I think so. I hope so. Happy Canada Day and keep drinking.