Happy Death Day

Year Of Release: 2017

Genre: Horror

Run Time: 96mns

Age Rating: 15 (UK)

Director: Christopher Landon

**SPOILER ALERT**

Synopsis

After haughty college sorority girl Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe), wakes up on her birthday in the college dorm room of Carter Davis (Israel Broussard), she carries on her day as usual. However after leaving her house later that night to attend a house party she is ambushed and murdered in an underpass by a masked assailant dressed as her university's mascot. After haughty college sorority girl Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe), wakes up on her birthday in the college dorm room of Carter Davis (Israel Broussard), she carries on her day as usual. However after retreating from a creepy underpass on her way to a house party and returning home to find a surprise birthday party waiting for her, she is once again murdered. Tree soon realises that she is experiencing the day of her death on repeat, confiding this information to her new friend Carter they realise that to move past her death day she must find her killer and prevent her murder.

Review

To say that going to see this film was more of a spur of the moment decision than a €2 tattoo in Málaga would be an understatement. Having never seen the trailer in its entirety my only knowledge of the film came from the first 10 or so seconds of the trailer, in which an attractive girl wakes up in a strangers bed and ignores her dad's call. Naturally my sequence of thoughts upon seeing this were that attractive girl, one night stand and daddy issues are pretty much the standard ingredients for a lonely divorced man's search history on a porn site. My second thought however was 'OH good I can skip this advert'! 'How bad can it be' I asked myself as I sat in the cinema, the answer to that is due to the fact that unlike a €2 tattoo it didn't give me hepatitis and similarly to a porno there was a happy ending I can safely state that this film was a surprisingly enjoyable viewing experience.  

A reconstruction of how 'HDD' gained it's identity.

It's well known that it doesn't count as copying if you take a pre-existing formula and change a few plot points and, well 'Happy Death Day' takes that idea and commits the creative equivalent of grand larceny, with the plot bearing a striking resemblance to a plethora of other creative properties. I can only imagine that the producers started off with the words 'Groundhog Day' written in bubble writing in the middle of a whiteboard as they discussed how they could go about making the reboot. This was until one sparkly eyed intern who was bringing them coffee said to them, 'If an original ship is replaced piece by piece over time at what point does it become a new ship?'. Now being producers in Hollywood c.2016 they were not familiar with the concept of originality, so after a quick Google search of the definition they decided that a ship is a new ship after replacing two oars, the crew and stealing the figurehead from a different vessel. Now this similarity could have been its downfall had the film taken itself too seriously and really tried to be a gritty horror, however after an initial jumpy start it settles out into a more light hearted romp much like the film's blatant source of inspiration. What I feel saved this film from falling into the sweaty pit of try hard despair that is usually populated by hipsters and teen wolf enthusiasts, is that instead of trying to seem different and edgy the film poses a moderate sense of self awareness and acceptance of its origins.

Pictured above: Secondary characters from 'HDD'

make a cameo in Chrome's endless runner

It was only after writing an entire paragraph in which I effectively whinged about how underdeveloped all of the characters were within 'Happy Death Day' that I realised that the writers had struck character development gold with the storyline. The simple fact is that, within a world that resets itself everyday leaving only the main character with all of their memories in tact, no character with the exception of the lead role will have any memory of the previous events and will act out their day in the exact same manner over and over. This means that any character development is rendered void by the end of the day leaving the secondary characters as little more than living props for the protagonist to interact with, but in the context of this narrative, that's fine. Saying that though, the secondary characters were by no means weak as strong acting and believable character interactions that played heavily on stereotypes kept them afloat and managed to make them have very defined individual personalities. So even though what the audience see of these characters is little more than a single scene with each of them, they get to see quite a broad view of their personas each time Tree interacts with them in a different way.

A short excerpt from Tree's diary.

The character of Tree Gelbman (our protagonist) is the one character we truly see change in throughout the film's runtime. She starts off as a typical spoilt and rude sorority girl who's greatest achievement up until the start of the film had been keeping her sexual partner count down to two individuals a day, this changes however throughout the course of the movie. By the end of the story the audience have seen their protagonist develop from what was essentially a gobby bus for venereal diseases transform into a much more likeable and respectful character, a change that we have all seen before in various teen movies. However, I couldn't help but feel like Tree's transformation was a lot more of a rewarding viewing experience than I have seen before in this type of character arc, as many times as it's been used. This I feel was due to the touching romance between Tree and the nerdy secondary protagonist Carter, as whilst it's relatively common for the popular girl to end up with the awkward nerd in this sort of film, the character of Tree changes so dramatically to accommodate him into her life. There is one scene in particular in which she has thwarted her would be murderer and holds their life in her hands, however earlier in that scene Carter had been killed after saving her from the attacker. After realising that should she finish her day Carter would be dead forever she hangs herself so that she can be with him again, creating the most powerful scene in the film.

There was only one character that I truly took issue with in 'HDD' and that was Tree's roommate Lori. Now she had spent the vast majority of the film flying completely under the radar acting as a moderately sweet girl who genuinely seemed to like Tree. This illusion was all flipped however in the closing 10 minutes of the film when it was revealed that she had been Tree's masked assailant all along. I remember sitting in the cinema and thinking that the film must have slipped some clever hidden clues along the way about why she was doing this or just some deep seated reason that had been staring me in the face. I was intrigued, I knew I had to give this film a second viewing to look for all of the concealed foreshadowing. But no, the reasoning behind this sweet roommate's vicious murdering spree was that she fancied her teacher (a character that Tree had been shacking up with at the start of the film) and wanted Tree out of the way so that she could move in on him during the wake, or something to that nature. So phoned in was this explanation that even Tree's initial reaction was that of complete confusion. It was at this point that I realised that I no longer cared if they had slipped in subtle hints about Lori's true nature, due to the fact that her whole issue could have been sorted out by spreading a rumour of her rival having chlamydia!

Overall, even when taking into account that the whole plot of the film rests entirely on the idea that the best way to stop two people from having sex is by killing one of them, I would recommend 'HDD' as a film to watch, if only once. Due to a comedic script that veers towards the self aware and strong performances from it's cast, 'Happy Death Day' overcomes the issues that it could have faced had it tried to sever all ties from it's inspiration.

Scoring

                                                                   

                                                                    Final Score: 14

     

Footnote (to answer the questions nobody cares about):

Q: What is your favourite species of cacti?

A: I personally enjoy the Echinocactus Platyacanthus due to their variety of uses in traditional sweet production and weaving

Q: What foot size are you?

A: 6' 1"