Happy Birthday (2023) Review – A Technically Incompetent Slasher Fumble

Welcome to Knockout Horror. What do you get when you put together a talented and popular social media personality with a director who is way out of their depth and a filmmaking crew that doesn’t know their arses from a hole in the ground? Why, you get slasher horror Happy Birthday from 2023, of course. Let’s take a look.

Generic slasher stuff happens

Happy Birthday‘s plot is one that you have seen a million times before and, to be fair, not really something that the movie deserves a whole bunch of criticism for. I mean, slashers haven’t been original for a very long time. This is the same old generic slasher trash you have seen a million times before. Only worse!

A young woman with a troubled past heads out to a vacant home on the edge of town with her friends. Story flashbacks hint that something traumatic took place involving the woman and her family.

The friends hang out at the house, they share a box of beers and some moonshine. One of them takes a shit on, what looks like, the deck of the house, most of the characters chain smoke. A killer comes along and things take a turn for the worse for them. The end.

Poor in every way

This is one of those rare examples of a movie that fails on nearly every level. Aside from its generic and oh so tired plot. It relentlessly throws genre cliché after genre cliché at the viewer. Unconcerned as to whether they make for a compelling story or not.

“Happy Birthday fails on nearly every level. It relentlessly throws genre cliché after genre cliché at the viewer, unconcerned as to whether they make for a compelling story.”

We have the generic psychiatric ward; the patient with a violent past; the short-tempered psychiatrist; the clueless friend who likes a drink; the deep and complex main girl; the main girl’s love interest. It is just so damn generic. That’s really not the main problem with Happy Birthday, though. It’s everything else; it is just so poorly made.

Scenes flit around confusingly from one location to the next and from the past to the present. Flashbacks are poorly transitioned, denoted by the sudden switch to a 1.85:1 aspect ratio from its typical 16:9. Outside of a few characters, acting is wooden and awkward, editing is some of the worst I have ever seen in horror. Sound production hisses horribly and echoes throughout. Music is horrendously loud and incredibly repetitive, effects work is genuinely pathetic.

The film is littered with pointless, awkward sex scenes, characters stripped to their bras for minor titillation, and the story is mundane and boring. The script is also shockingly bad, bordering on the remedial at times. How did three writers manage to cough up something so horrendous? Were they each writing in a different language and then translating it like a game of Chinese whispers?

Leaps of logic and utter silliness

There are gross leaps of logic needed to buy into the events that take place in Happy Birthday. This is common in horror but this movie takes it to a different level. It sort of makes a mockery of the viewer’s intelligence. We are expected to believe that a certain character would not speak up about her experience with the house they visit. That psychiatric hospitals will house kids that happen to simply be a tiny bit troubled and that dangerous patients would be given the opportunity to cause mayhem due to the place having only three members of staff. It is silly and it goes on throughout the movie; it is just one logic leap after another.

I also feel like I have to point out one scene in particular for how hilariously bad it was. The characters are having a chat while driving down the road. All the while a green-screen backdrop continuously loops in the background while a completely different scene loops on the other side.

“I have never seen anything this bad in horror outside of movies like Birdemic. The images glitch and parts of the character’s faces are cut off.”

It is so utterly poor and represents complete incompetence on the part of the filmmakers. The images glitch against their containers and parts of the character’s faces are cut off. I have never seen anything this bad in horror outside of movies like Birdemic.

Direction is seriously lacking

Direction is a major problem in this movie. I can only imagine that Chris Helton is very inexperienced with full feature-length movies. The continuity between shots is a complete mess with character’s positions switching, hair moving to different sides, character’s posture changing and much more.

At certain points, characters run from one location directly into another with nothing to illustrate the journey. Not a big issue when it is inconsequential but when someone is running from a maniacal killer it both looks stupid and robs the movie of tension. Shot transitions are abrupt and jarring, some of the framing is incomprehensible. Actors often seem to be poorly informed on their cues and there’s a distinctly high school drama class feeling to everything.

The pacing here is really bad with certain sequences dragging tremendously and a whole bunch of needless padding. On top of that, there is a serious lack of care throughout. You can actually hear the director speak in at least one scene. You hear him say to actor Maddie Henderson to “Pull your hair back out of your face”. I didn’t hear that on headphones either, that was on my TV at a normal volume.

Incredibly sloppy. Helton’s decision to use different aspect ratios for flashback scenes is a bizarre one. The transitions feel abrupt, amateur and very messy. There are far more problems than this but I am trying to keep this short.

Only one thing going for it

Helton’s insistence on having characters smoking all the damn time makes for a ton of messy shot variation, with cigarettes changing hands or disappearing completely out of frame. I am not at all sure why certain characters smoke so much.

“The only thing this movie has going for it is the performance of Maddie Henderson. She does a genuinely great job turning Bernadette into a believable character.”

It adds nothing to the story at all. It even creates its own lingering series of issues with regards to continuity. It’s constant, as well. Bernadette gets up in the morning and lights up, she gets out of the shower and lights a cigarette, she takes a shit and has a smoke. This chick must stink.

Speaking of which, the only thing this movie has going for it is the performance of Maddie Henderson. She does a genuinely great job turning Bernadette into a character who feels both believable and authentic. Considering her lack of acting experience, it’s impossible not to notice just how far above the rest of the cast she seems. Everyone else is somewhere between bad and awful.

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