The Birthday (Arcadia Motion Pictures, November 10, 2006)

What are you doing right now? Whatever it is, stop it. Stop it and watch the Corey Feldmen vehicle The Birthday. Watch it. Right! Damn! Now!

“Woah, Simmons,” you may be saying to yourself. “Where’s the fire? What’s the rush?”

The rush is twofold. Fold First — while this is a belated movie review, it isn’t my fault that it is so late! We are lucky that this move is viewable at all. Forces, dark forces, have tried to keep The Birthday down, to keep you, the peoples, from seeing it.

Second Fold. How can I say this… I’m a man of a certain age, I don’t usually get fired up about movies anymore. Some of my generation get bees in their bonnets and burrs ‘neath their saddles with remakes and reboots and whatever. Myself? I have a very zen-like attitude toward the whole thing. Hollywood made movies for me for like 40 years. It would be poor form to ask for more.

That said, in the early 90s it seemed that Hollywood was pulling movies straight from my subconscious. Robert Sarandon starring in The Resurrected, and the Fred Ward powerhouse To Cast A Deadly Spell. The former being a stab at filming Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” the second a Lovecraftian 40s noir comedy — yes, please! And I’m not casting any shade at its sequel, Dennis Hopper and Julian Sands’ Witchhunt. My friends, Tremors was like putting a quarter in a slot machine and winning $100!

The Birthday falls into that kind of thing. A guy walks into the wrong damn place at the wrong damn time and things spiral out of hand. Way out of hand.

Feldman’s Norman Forrest is a decent guy, but he’s a schlub: nervous, nasal-y, and he’s trying his best to put on a brave face at his girlfriend’s father’s birthday party. These are not his people; they are wealthy (her father owns a string of hotels — including the venue for the party), his girlfriend has just gotten back from a trip to Europe — a long one it would appear.

Norman is trying to make his feelings for her known, but he’s constantly getting sidetracked. Last minute party issues, the fact some of his high school friends are having a corporate party on another floor, and then, well, there is something really weird going on in the background of the hotel. The wait staff, the cooks, something, several somethings, are going on.

Cults? Secret Agencies? Murder in the sub-basement? A hero needs to step forth, and lord help us, the only guy who even matches that description is certainly not Norman Forrest. The hero that steps forth is Theodore, who claims to a secret agent, the point of the spear of a… well, a counter-cult maybe? But he can’t do much on his own and Lord help us, the only person he can rely on is Norman Forrest. But then, Theodore may be so crazy that in reality he’s the real threat.

Norman is a lot of things, but he’s not a fool. He’s open minded enough to ask questions, but not so open-minded that his brain’s gonna fall out, or that he’s going to let someone fill it with nonsense. But he’s in one of those situations where, by the time you get the proof you really need, it may well be too late.

I only heard about the movie because one of my lefty-liberal websites had an interview with Feldman discussing it:

That is what that experience is with Norman. He has his high school buddy [Vince] around and he remembers being a kid and talking about girls in the locker room. There was a time when Norman wasn’t so neurotic. But maybe he also felt he wasn’t the best athlete and didn’t fit in because he didn’t like taking a shower with all the guys. I put him back in his school days whenever he interacted with his friend Vince. Juxtaposing that with this Indiana Jones character, Theodore, who may be a kook or savior. Is Theodore out of his mind and wandering in here with this fantasy, or is he really there because there is something going on, and this is Norman’s calling? Is Norman going to warn everyone there’s a crazy person running around the hotel, or is he going to believe this guy and take his gun and go on this adventure too? There is a whole side Norman develops that he didn’t know existed.

The movie is claustrophobic and at times muddy, but then if you’ve ever been stuck in a building with multiple parties and conflicting goals, you know that it can feel tight and muddled.

Check it out!

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Adrian Simmons is an editor for Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, check out their Best-of Volume 4 Anthology, or support them on Patreon!