E's Reviews: Happy Death Day

Happy Saturday everyone! It’s almost time....Halloween is almost upon us! And yes, I know, this review is a little late, my bad. But today, I got a good one for y’all...well, it was somewhat good. Let’s dive into...HAPPPY DEATH DAY!

Happy Death Day is directed by Christopher Landon and stars Jessica Rothe as Tree, a teenage girl, trying to enjoy her birthday, who soon realizes that this is her final one. That is, if she can figure out who her killer is. She must relive that day, over and over again, dying in a different way each time. Can she solve her own murder?

Alright, so the technical aspects of the movie first I guess. Visually it looks fine, the direction and the camera work is fine. It’s nothing too distracting or that will take you out of the movie. The musical score is fine, it fits the film. There’s a montage in it that I actually found pretty enjoyable, even kind of funny (but wait, this is a horror movie, right?)

Yes, it is a horror movie. But I’d classify it more like a horror comedy? Like that television series, Scream Queens if they had an arc where the characters were stuck in an infinite loop like Groundhog Day (which if you haven’t seen, is fantastic and you must do so right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait). I thought the gimmick of dying over and over and over again, trying to figure out who’s your killer each time, gave the movie a little bit of a whodunit mystery aspect, which I thought was pretty interesting.

The performances were alright, the acting was alright, no one was really terrible or did a bad job with the material. Some things did bug me though with the characters. There wasn’t really one character that was developed right or made me actually care about. Like, Tree is being murdered every day, on her birthday, without fail, but she’s such a jerk to everyone around her, that I stopped caring that she was being killed. It was like karma was coming back to get her and she deserved it. But that wasn’t the worst part of the screenplay...the character development (or lack thereof) made the characters into one dimensional cliches. They became boring to watch at some points. The lack of development even let me figure out who the killer was almost immediately, which if you’re unaware of, will kill a whodunit thriller right away. This film is also PG-13, so don’t expect really interesting kills or blood and gore...there wasn’t much, if any at all. It felt like a cash grab to put teens in the seats, which I guess is Blumhouse’s way of doing things these days. Kudos to them for knowing their target audience.

The strengths of this film are really in the comedic ways Tree is murdered and the back and forth between her and a couple of characters. The montage, as I said before, was very fun to watch. It did a good job being a movie that was self aware of itself and knew it wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously. Everything else was fine, nothing was really too horribly done. And I heard they’re making a sequel...so that’ll be interesting to see if they can pull off another winner at the box office.

Final Score: 7/10