Fantastic Fest: The Birthday

by Jette Kernion, Cinematical.Com
October 10, 2005

I returned to Fantastic Fest late in the evening for one of the last shows of the festival: The Birthday, about which I'd heard mixed reviews. I knew that The Birthday was shot in Spain by a Spanish director, but in English, and it starred Corey Feldman, and it was described as "a Lovecraftian comedy." If you dangle the word "comedy" in front of me when discussing a horror movie, I'm there.
Director Eugenio Mira introduced the film. He explained that he is a huge fan of The Goonies and that The Birthday is a tribute to it and to similar Eighties films. I have to confess that I have never made it all the way through The Goonies. At the time, it looked like a little-boy movie to me and I was never interested enough to change my mind.
The Birthday was preceded by a short from Japan called OH! Mikey that didn't work for me. Department-store mannequins from the 1950s exchanging bizarre conversations? Internet humor.
The Alamo showed a couple of trailers for old Corey Feldman movies to get us in the mood. I didn't know Meatballs 4 even existed, nor have I ever seen Dream a Little Dream. In fact, I can probably count on one hand the number of Feldman movies I've ever seen. If The Birthday is full of sly references to his films, I missed them.
The Birthday is a very strange movie indeed. It will certainly achieve cult-film notoriety. If no one told you it was supposed to be a horror film, you would never know from the first 30 minutes. Corey Feldman's character, who is allegedly modeled after Jerry Lewis, reminded me more of Milton, Stephen Root's character in Office Space, but dressed for an Eighties prom. He has one of those nagging girlfriends whom I have seen entirely too much of in films lately. She bosses him all around her dad's birthday party. But little by little, you can see that something is amiss, even if you can't quite tell what. What's in the huge crate that the waiters are lugging into the kitchen? Why is it so cold in the party room? What's behind the allusions to a funeral, to a family history of cancer, to medical experimentation?
Not that you find out the answers to all of these questions, and in fact, the movie ends in an unresolved way. It may be ambiguous but I found it pretty funny. It was a very good way to end the four-day Fantastic Fest.

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