Happy Death Day is a PG-13 horror movie. It’s produced by
Blumhouse. It was directed by the man behind the middle four Paranormal
Activity movies. And yet, in spite of all these things, I’m happy to
report that this is actually a pretty solid movie. The comedic slasher film
(and surprise box-office topper) breaks up the standard
“teen-blonde-gets-killed-by-a-spooky-masked-killer” premise by having the
protagonist loop back in time. She must repeat the day of her murder over and
over again, Groundhog Day-style, until she’s able to figure out who keeps
killing her and why.
This is a very self-aware movie, satirizing our expectations
of how teen slasher films work with generally amusing results. It’s by no means
a game-changer like Wes Craven’s Scream, but it succeeds in being a
sneaky parody of the horror movies that came before it, which I greatly
appreciated. There were several sequences in the film where I was genuinely
caught off guard, and had no idea where the plot could possibly go next. They
knew what I, a horror film junkie, expected them to do; so they mockingly did
the opposite to hilarious effect. It was the moments like this that reminded me
of 2013’s You’re Next, the last horror satire that surprised audiences with
its unconventional twists. Add some teen-movie snark to the dialogue, and you
have Happy
Death Day.
If you’re thinking “Wow, that sounds exhausting”, you’re
pretty spot on.
Pacing-wise, this movie doesn’t slow down. It has a lot it
wants to do, and goes for it with a pretty relentless force. Whenever there was
a seemingly slow or predictable moment, it was always the setup to an
outlandish punchline, be it a ridiculous kill or a totally unexpected plot
twist. They even address the inevitable Groundhog Day comparison in a clever
way, letting us in on the fact that they know their own gimmick. Which brings
me to my main problem with the film.
In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is a
jerk, but the rest of the world is pretty average. Boring and annoying, but
nothing out of the ordinary. This gives Murray’s character a contrasting
backdrop to play off of, and makes his “I’ll-stop-being-the-worst” arc easy to
latch onto. It also does a very good job of letting the audience know we’re
never going to get a firm explanation of why or how his time-warping is
happening. We just accept it and go along for the ride. In Happy Death Day,
unfortunately, the characters are all terrible people, and the rules of her
murder-cycle are rather ambiguous and undefined. The moments where they explain
the details of how she keeps reliving the same day only provoke further
confusion.
I give a ton of credit to lead actress Jessica Rothe’s
performance. She pulls everything she can out of every moment, both spooky and
silly, and makes it fun to hate her as she selfishly abuses everybody in her
life. The problem there though is that she has other selfish jerk characters
around her, so it often times comes off as one-note or annoying. It took me a good 15-20 minutes before I
adjusted to a world full of uppity sorority girls who all secretly hate each
other. When there’s no contrast, the comedy falls flat. Although he was an
obvious plot device and exposition machine, I appreciated Rothe’s scenes with
her male co-star Israel Broussard, as it gave her someone worthy of bouncing
her sarcastic jokes off of.
3.5 out of 5
