Happy Birthday to Me

Melissa Sue Anderson, fresh off Little House on the Prairie, plays a prep-school student whose snobbish clique keeps getting murdered while she suffers blackouts after brain surgery from a crash she cannot remember. The director is J. Lee Thompson, of The Guns of Navarone and the original Cape Fear, which lends the whole thing a gloss the material never earns. The poster, a boy skewered through the mouth on a shish-kebab, sold a lot of tickets to a film that hoards its one great kill and a preposterous twist for the very end. Glenn Ford turns up to collect a cheque. Prime cut of the early-80s glut, pedigree and all.