Happy Death Day (2017)
Christopher B Landon
"Would you stop looking at me like I took a dump
on your mom's head?"
Here's something unusual: a movie that's still in theaters as part of the Spooktober Review Fest!on your mom's head?"
If you haven't seen the trailer for Happy Death Day yet, take a look:
You're thinking, "Hey, this is nothing but a terribly named Groundhog Day mixed with a generic teenage slasher film." And you're not totally wrong. It is Groundhog Day mixed with a teenage slasher film, but there's nothing generic about it. This might be shocking, but Happy Death Day is damn great, and I'm glad I went and saw it.
The name is terrible, though.
The premise is simple: a sorority sister named Tree (played brilliantly by Jessica Rothe) wakes up in a strange boy's dorm room on her birthday. After trying to shake off her hangover, she goes about her regular life, acting like an asshole to everyone she meets. And I mean everyone. She's mean to people she doesn't know, and even meaner to her supposed friends. She's particularly awful to her sorority house roommate, who sweetly baked Tree a cupcake for her birthday. Tree throws it away right in front of her without tasting it, admonishing her for offering up carbs.
On her way to a frat party that night, Tree meets her untimely demise at the hands of a masked attacker. The mask is fantastic, by the way. The fake university they attend, something called Mayfield University, has a giant baby for a mascot. It's absurd and adds a hilarious element to the killing:
Normally, the killer would be the focus of this type of movie, and the jerk sorority girl would just be early slasher fodder. But luckily for Tree, she wakes up at the beginning of the day, back in the nice boy's dorm room. Now both Tree and the audience can be suspicious of all of the people in her life as she travels throughout her birthday yet again. This time she makes it to the frat party, but is murdered by the same baby-faced assailant while flirting with her friend's boyfriend.
There are a lot of similarities to Groundhog Day besides the overall premise: Tree wakes up to the same musical cue every morning, she's confronted by an annoying person on her walk back home, and she convinces her new friend Carter (the nice boy whose room she wakes up in) that she's repeating each day by pointing out random occurrences before they happen. There's even a direct reference, as Carter tells Tree her story sounds just like the movie Groundhog Day. It's a nice jab to old, awful nerds like me when Tree says she's never heard of it, and also has never heard of someone named Bill Murray. It's a great gag.
The movie is full of genuine laugh out loud moments, but the comedy is natural and works as part of the story, not like it was tacked on for cheap teenage goofs. After Tree realizes that she has pseudo-immortality and an opportunity to solve her own murder, there's a great montage sequence where she's killed over and over and over again. She takes dying in stride, and embraces a bold new confident persona as she realizes she has the opportunity to live exactly how she wants. My favorite is when she strides through campus completely naked, giving sassy finger guns to gawkers along the way.
There's a respect for the characters in the writing. Tree is a pretty awful person, but we learn that birthdays are not easy for her due to a past trauma. She also has the same sort of journey of self discovery that Phil Connors does in Groundhog Day. Carter seems like a guy who brought her back to his dorm room to have sex with her, but it turns out he slept in his roommate's bed, saying that she was too wasted to consent. At one point, Tree discovers a tertiary character is gay, but it's not played up for a joke, and she encourages him to embrace it. Good stuff for a PG-13 slasher with a mostly teenage audience.
The writing is pretty smart in general. Each time I thought things had devolved into nonsense slasher laziness, there was a clever twist to draw me right back in, including the very ending. It's a little hokey and a smidge unrealistic at parts, but nothing that made me groan or roll my eyes. It's played up for fun, and it all works.
No spoilers here, because it's still out in theaters, and because I really think it's worth seeing. Happy Death Day is a great way to introduce a fun, smart slasher movie to a teenager without having to worry about buckets of blood or inappropriate sex stuff.
Summary:
Happy Death Day is a rare treat: I went in expecting to hate it, but came out delighted. Easy recommend.
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