Groundhog Day (1993) is quite the masterpiece for it's time and continues to hold up well today. It's such a fun movie that countless other films have tried to mimic it's greatness but none have ever come close to measuring up, in my opinion anyway. TV shows like Charmed, Supernatural and even The X-Files have had episodes that involved some sort of time loop. So why not a horror movie?
After a night of partying, self centered college student, Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) wakes up in the dorm room of Carter Davis (Israel Broussard). Confused and embarrassed, she quickly dresses and goes about her day as usual. Later that night, as she's headed to a party, she's murdered by an unknown assailant. Next thing she knows, she's waking up in Carter's room again and the day starts over again. She, of course, writes off all the familiar happenings as deja vu, at least until she's headed back to the party. Creeped out, she decides to go a different way and ends up being killed again. When she finally figures out what's going on, she realizes in order to stop the cycle, she has to find out who wants her dead and why.
Honestly, I didn't have high hopes for this movie. Admittedly, I haven't been watching a ton of movies lately but main stream horror hasn't been really given me the urge to do so either. However, Happy Death Day was refreshingly clever. It gets moving pretty quickly and doesn't let up much at all. It's like a riding a roller coater for the first time. Given the amount of times Tree is killed, the death scenes were quite creative. It's like director Christopher Landon and writer Scott Lobdell sat down in a room together and asked, "Ok, how many different ways can we kill someone?", then just went for it and nailed it. I appreciate that they didn't go over board with elaborate kills and shove blood and gore down the audience's throat. Sometimes simple is better and it's nice to see a movie that doesn't take itself too seriously. They knew going in what they were going for and made it look easy.
Speaking of making things look easy, Rothe definitely steals the show with her performance. She brings a lot of life to an otherwise unlikable character and does an incredible job conveying growth over the course of the movie. It takes a special writer and actor to make an audience root for such an obnoxious character. In fact, I found that every actor involved did a pretty outstanding job. Rothe and Broussard mesh well together and I can see each of them doing more great things in the future.
While the film is far from perfect, it is tremendously fun. It has a great mix of horror, comedy and, dare I say, even a little romance. It's a rare thing to see a slasher movie take all those elements and successfully bring them together. If you're a fan of the slasher genre, do yourself a favor and watch it. And, I hear they're working on a second part as well so here's to hoping it's as good as this one.
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