Pienet paholaiset

It’s a shame about the routine C-movie rendering and amateurish performances of the actors portraying the adult characters, because the concept of this horror film about murderous children, and especially the splendidly disturbing and repulsive performances of the child actors, could have been the basis of an excellent horror movie. In places, Bloody Birthday has the chilling and disturbing attributes of the Spanish film Who Can Kill a Child?, but the overall impression that it gives is that its creators tried too hard to please the mainstream audience or subordinated the film to the norms of trash filmmaking at the time. Besides the boorish and counterproductive sequences with nudity, this is unfortunately manifested in the need to add some rationalisation to the scenes, thus eliminating any unease through some sort of overwrought genre element that goes beyond the real world. Unfortunately, the ridiculously absurd astrological nonsense that frames all of the action fundamentally diminishes the film’s effectiveness. (19.04.2014)

The visuals of a 1980s American town are reminiscent of Spielberg, while the music is stolen from everywhere, beginning with Psycho and ending with Jaws. But the idea behind Bloody Birthday is something else. Three children murder adults. Not for supernatural reasons (Village of the Damned), but because they are evil and enjoy it. No one can imagine cute kids being behind the murders, so there is no room for investigation and the brats can run wild. A bizarre film that feels two hours long, and as it second half keeps revolving around the same characters, it gets boring. The performances of the three child villains seem comical in places. Most of the film takes place during day time and the jump scares do not work. It is not so much a horror film as a curiosity for fans of genre guilty pleasures. (26.03.2015)

Bloody Birthday has a great advantage in that the children played their roles really well. Their killing methods are also very inventive. This makes watching the individual scenes even more unpleasant. There are some flaws when it comes to the handling of the individual killing scenes, but the overall atmosphere of the film makes up for it, as does its denouement. (08.02.2018)