Review

Happy Death Day

Blumhouse (Split, Get Out, Whiplash) produces a rewinding thriller in Happy Death Day, in which a college student (Jessica Rothe) relives the day of her murder with both its unexceptional details and terrifying end until she discovers her killer’s identity.
Blumhouse (Split, Get Out, Whiplash) produces a rewinding thriller in Happy Death Day, in which a college student (Jessica Rothe) relives the day of her murder with both its unexceptional details and terrifying end until she discovers her killer’s identity.

Happy Death Day follows in the oft-repeated footsteps of Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow and, more recently, If I Fell. Essentially, the protagonist is forced to repeat the same day repeatedly until he or she learns to be a better person. At least director Christopher Landon starts the film off with a small, amusing gag. The Universal logo starts to display and then abruptly starts over. Feel free to walk out now because the wit fails after this.

Medical student Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) has just awakened on her birthday with a doozy of a hangover in a men's dormitory, and her slacks are lying neatly folded on a nearby table. She has apparently crashed in the room of a tasteful (we know this from the posters for Repo Man, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie and They Live!) young fellow named Carter (Israel Broussard) -- and has to shame walk across campus in stilettos to get back to her sorority house so she can get through the rest of the day.

Happy Death Day

71

Cast: Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Ruby Modine, Rachel Matthews, Charles Aitken, Jason Bayle, Phi Vu, Donna Duplantier

Director: Christopher Landon

Rating: PG-13, for violence/terror, crude sexual content, language, some drug material and partial nudity

Running Time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

Before a knife-wielding maniac kills her at the end of the evening, Tree maintains an affair with her married professor (Charles Aitken) and treats her roommate (Ruby Modine) like dirt, even though the latter has made Tree a birthday cupcake, which our health-conscious heroine tosses away. (Maybe she should consider all the calories in her booze.)

While it goes without saying that Tree (short for "Teresa") isn't terribly likable, one might wish the killer had the taste to remove some other characters as well. Her sorority sister (Rachel Matthews) ridicules how people speak who are hard of hearing. Her fellow students yammer as would middle schoolers, and their course work doesn't seem too scholarly. Her prof's lectures present as half-remembered TED Talks or Drunk History episodes.

Landon tries to create chills the way Harold Ramis crafted chuckles in Groundhog Day, but Tree's various demises just get more and more anticlimactic each time. Inevitability drains away any sense of tension. Worse, his bag of tricks seems limited to jump scares with all the jolt of a watered-down glass of Red Bull.

photo

Director Christopher Landon (from left), Ruby Modine as Lori and Jessica Rothe as Tree on the set of Happy Death Day.

Producer Jason Blum's name has appeared on a couple of terrific thrillers, Split and Get Out, this year. As with those movies, Happy Death Day will probably make a handsome profit off of its no-frills approach. But this one is cheaply imagined as well as realized, and it's hard to get over the feeling that it'd be better to stream or rent Groundhog Day -- or any of the movies advertised in Carter's dorm room -- than it is to reward these filmmakers.

MovieStyle on 10/13/2017

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