Happy Death Day (2017)
Directed by Christopher Landon
Written by Scott Lobdell
Starring Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard
Release Date October 13th, 2017
Happy Death Day is one of the best surprises of 2017. This seemingly throwaway teen slasher flick turns out to be a sneaky black comedy version of Groundhog Day if Bill Murray were being murdered every day. The film was directed by Christopher Lambert whose résumé is riddled with mediocre screenplays for the Paranormal Activity franchise and whose first feature was the idiotic Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, which leaves me to wonder where he’s been hiding this version of his work?
Happy Death Day stars budding superstar Jessica Rothe as Tree Gelbman, a perky blonde college girl raised on the aesthetics of Mean Girls and Legally Blonde. Her life is lived one party to the next and one partner to the next, until one day she wakes up and finds that the nightmare she had the night before about being murdered by a psycho in a baby mask, was actually real and that she is, for no discernible reason, reliving the day of her death over and over again.
Like Groundhog Day, Happy Death Day doesn’t have much interest in why Tree is stuck in a loop, rather the filmmakers are obsessed with what she does with her repeated days. These break down into several scenarios familiar from Groundhog Day but each with a fun little twist. Tree’s predicament seems like it might be framed for typical slasher fare but instead, the film is infused with a darkly comic, almost slapstick, take on Tree’s predicament in which she constantly tries to anticipate her killer and fails only to wake up comically frustrated by her latest death.
Director Landon crafts a quite clever story that does well to establish a number of potential murderers, among them Tree’s roommate, her sorority rival, a dopey frat guy, a weirdo stalker, Tree’s dad, her love interest Carter (Israel Broussard), and an escaped serial killer. Watching Tree spend some of her days investigating her own death proves to be a good deal of fun, especially her failures in which she is murdered in increasingly unlikely ways.
Find my full length review in the Horror Community on Vocal 
