42. Happy Death Day

I’d seen the advert for Happy Death Day, and was really interested to see how the entire film would pan out. When I say interested, I mean I could instantly tell it was going to be great, or absolutely terrible. Unfortunately, I was completely wrong and it was neither. I guess you can take negatives and positives from that actually.

The film stars Jessica Rothe as Tree, as she wakes up on her birthday and bumbles through her day before a party. As she walks to the party, she gets killed. But in true Ground Hog Day style (like I’ve seen that film), she wakes up, on her birthday, in the exact same situation. As you would, she goes a different way to the party, to avoid the murderer. We soon discover that it doesn’t matter what she does, her murder is about to occur, and it does so in lots of different ways, varying in creativity.

Tree realises that to move on from her birthday, and make it to the next day, she needs to work out who the murderer is, and eliminate them.

I will be honest and say I did jump a mile right at the beginning of the film, but I don’t particularly think that it is an intense film, it’s not overly scary. Some moments of suspense worked well in building tension, but I feel the theme of the film takes away uncertainty. You know she’s going to get murdered, so I feel it takes away some of the surprise and build up.

I also am not sure how easy this film is to ‘guess’ as my good buddy George went ‘it’s them’ right at the beginning, and he was kinda right. There are twists and turns in the film, but I don’t think these are fully committed to. The way the film works is that Tree suspects someone, so goes to destroy them, still gets killed, and then wakes up. There isn’t that intense build up of ‘is it? Isn’t it’ for each suspect, and I think that comes down to the concept of the film. In this manner, it also stops it from being overly scary. I think if you’re not a big scary movie fan, but fancied something a bit spooky over Halloween, it’s definitely something you can handle. Not overly gory, a bit creepy, and a few jumpy bits.

Overall, again this film was pretty average. It did hold my attention the whole way through, and I was interested to see who the murderer was, but it just wasn’t the most exciting, interesting, or innovative film. I like films that make my head hurt a bit as I try to work them out. Happy Death Day gets a 6/10 from me.