Birthday Bloody Birthday

Seriously, how great a title for a movie is Bloody Birthday? I mean, that tells you all you need to know right there. It's someone's birthday, and there's blood everywhere. In fact, the only trouble you'd get into naming a film Bloody Birthday is if you forgot to include a scene where it's someone's birthday, and they or someone close to them winds up extremely bloody.

I mention this only because Bloody Birthday will be playing, along with the less-expertly-titled The Children at the New Beverly Cinema in Hollywood on December 21st, and I will definitely be attending. It's the monthy exploitation double feature hosted by Eric Caidin of Hollywood Book and Poster and the true-to-his-name Johnny Legend, absent the past few months due to an extended fishing vacation in Florida.

These events are a total blast. I really can't recommend the Z-grade low-budget fare of the 60's, 70's and 80's enough...At past double-features, I've seen classics like Barbed Wire Dolls, Mondo Teeno, The Candy Snatchers, even Night of the Bloody Apes, which surprisingly takes place largely during the daytime and features not a single actual bloody ape.

Still not convinced that you want to spend four hours in the charmingly unrefurbished New Beverly Theater, right in the heart of Los Angeles' exclusive Wino District? Check out this plot description for The Children, fresh from IMDB to your monitor:

A busload of children has disappeared from the quiet New England town of Ravensback, and Sheriff Billy Hart is on the case. A short while later, he manages to track down the kids, but unfortunately they seem to have been transformed into murderous zombies by a cloud of radioactive gas. How can he stop the killer tykes before they destroy the town?

The part I love is that the children "seem to" have been transformed into murderous zombies. Is that really something that could appear to have happened, if it had not really happened? As in the sentence "the children seemed to have transformed into murderous zombies, but it turned out they were just hungrily ripping the flesh from terrified co-eds for sport," which, you'll recall, is from "The Bell Jar."

Well, I for one cannot stand to live the rest of my life without knowing how Sheriff Billy Hart will manage to stop the rampage of these insane tykes who seem to, for some reason involving radiation, have developed the desperate need to kill. Or possibly superpowers. Or both. Wait, I think I'm getting a screenplay idea...