Getting killed is such a drag. It would be so much more tolerable if every day didn’t start with a walk of shame. Can you actually die of embarrassment? Because I think a co-ed waking each morning in some nerd’s dorm room after being too drunk to amble back to the sorority might do the trick. Death-by-embarrassment might be preferable to her stock day of battling her sisters, ignoring her dad, and a frustrated patter with each of the boys in her life. And the icing on this cake is the nightly finale of a hooded figure in a baby mask wielding a butcher’s knife. Sorry, that’s a wrap. There will be no encore.
Getting killed is such a drag. It would be so much more tolerable if every day didn’t start with a walk of shame. Unless, of course, there is an encore. Or is this better referred to as a repeat performance? Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe). Yes, her name is “Tree,” perhaps because she gets cut down nightly. Tree is quite slow on the uptake, I think. Sure,it might be easy for me to sleepwalk through the same periods without noticing (I call them “work days”), but for a teen – and especially one consistently waking in an unfamiliar bed – there’s a different standard for “What’s going on?” On day #2, Tree wakes again the nerd dorm bed on the same day – her birthday. Yeah, I’d definitely notice if every day were both my birthday and my Happy Death Day. And, in fact, I might not retrace the exact same steps that led to another knife in the chest.
Getting killed is such a drag. It would be so much more tolerable if every day didn’t start with a walk of shame. So you get that this is a combo Groundhog Day/Friday the 13th, right? That’s kind of clever, a bit of a unique take on the theme. We all know that when the groundhog emerges and sees his shadow, we have six more weeks of winter. If the groundhog emerges, however, and severs the jugular of his nearest handler, I think we call that, “hurricane season.” The point is that Tree must figure out how to survive to the next day. Apparently, it’s harder than it looks. Woohoo, escape by car! Uh oh, gas tank explosion. Better reset that odometer.
I knew when I was going to die because my birth certificate has an expiration date. –Steven Wright
Getting killed is such a drag. It would be so much more tolerable if every day didn’t start with a walk of shame. If Tree is reliving the same day, some force must be resetting the day, no? The force must have intelligence, or at least a program which implies intelligence. That stands to reason, right? I mean, her life is like a video game with an infinite amount of lives until she reaches the next level. There may be no intelligence in the playing of a video game, but there certainly was intelligence in the making of the game (well, most games, at least. The jury is still out on Asteroids). What if the intelligent creator required a different threshold for advancement?
I mean, think about it – living through the day seems a rather arbitrary goal, does it not? It’s a key goal for Tree, of course, but why would the universe care? And would this not imply an evil universe? Toying with a young woman and watching her die every night? The very best you could call that is “tough love.” Hence, the goal of survival still seems rather arbitrary to me. I imagine these intelligent creators having a laugh over several beers:
“No, No, check this out. I’m going to let her go on until she orders a Happy Meal.”
Or “I’m waiting to see what it will take for her to get up and move out of town; is that not common sense?”
Or, given our current societal standards of evil, “check this, dudes, there’s a sniper in the campus bell tower; if she lives long 
enough to stroll in that direction, he will set a new campus record.” Yeah, yeah, I’m the bad guy for wanting gun control.
Getting killed is such a drag. It would be so much more tolerable if every day didn’t start with a walk of shame. At least you don’t have crabs on your last day. I wonder about Bill Murray living every day in a Punxsutawney winter – he never gets a hot shower, he never gets to sleep in, and he never gets to be anybody but middle-aged Bill Murray. Forget what I said about “death by embarrassment.” If I’m gonna live one day forever, being hot and young on a sunny college campus is not the world’s worst eternity … even if every nightfall ends in spontaneous blood donation. Happy Death Day is derivative, illogical, and at its root just another slasher film, but this was a different take on the theme and allowed us to know the first victim much better than we would have under normal circumstances. Maybe in the next iteration, she can get some cosmic payback. Uh oh, knife.
♪You know I can’t live through Tuesday
I can’t make my blues stray
I can’t dodge and I can’t fend
I’m finding it hard to stave off the end
You see I feel knives each evening
I get the ultimate piercing
If you only knew how I get run through
I just won’t live, yes, it’s true♫
Rated PG-13, 96 Minutes
Director: Christopher Landon
Writer: Scott Lobdell
Genre: Friday the 13th Groundhog Day
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Fans of closure
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People who hate gimmicks
♪ Parody Inspired by “Can’t Smile without You”
