Alison’s Birthday (1981)

Warning: there will be (some) spoilers, especially for the film’s structure and ending!

When she was sixteen, young Alison (Joanne Samuel) had a rather too exciting home-made Ouija board experience. During it, something purporting to be the spirit of her father (her parents both died in a car accident) possessed one of her friends to warn her not to return home to her uncle and aunt for her nineteenth birthday. After which something else manifested and telekinetically killed her friend.

Now Alison is nearing that nineteenth birthday, and she’s not really planning to go home for the day. What a surprise. She’s a bit busy with her life as a record saleswoman and her radio DJ boyfriend Peter (Lou Brown) anyway. Our heroine does change her mind when her aunt Jennifer (Bunney Brooke) suggests that her uncle Dean (John Bluthal) doesn’t have long to live. She does bring Peter with her, even though he isn’t going to sleep at her family’s place.

Not surprisingly, very strange things start to happen that just might suggest that the deadly warning from beyond of a couple of years ago was right on the money, and that the nice aunt and uncle couple may very well have some terrible plans for their niece. In the end, it’s going to be up to Peter to save Alison, which may or may not turn out to be great for the people involved.

Ian Coughlan’s folk/occult horror movie Alison’s Birthday had been quite difficult to see for decades, so my expectations for it were probably a bit higher than was good for my appreciation. There was a degree of disappointment when I finally got to see the film, for it is not, as one may have hoped for, a long lost masterpiece of its sub-genre(s), but a sometimes awkward mix of two very different kinds of horror film that doesn’t quite come together as perfectly as too high expectations would want it to.

However, looked at realistically, this is a fine little bit of horror with a handful of truly great scenes, and otherwise mostly solid ones, which (those are the rules) makes it a rather good film, just not the return of one’s favourite godhood on celluloid.

The film’s structure is peculiar: for its first half, we follow the misadventures of Alison, her exploration of the hidden secrets of her old home (major finds being a mini-Stonehenge in the supposedly snake-infested backyard, where “backyard” is interpreted in a very Australian way, and a genuine crone in the attic), her growing distrust of what functionally were her parents for much of her childhood, her trying to escape the cloying pressures of people being creepily nice and loving – all of which ends with her being drugged and hypnotized and losing her protagonist role.

At which point the film turns into a Dennis Wheatley-ish (if you can imagine Wheatley without his ultra-competent asshole heroes and weird rants about communism and Satan) occult conspiracy tale in which Peter uses his surprisingly good investigative skills to find out what’s going on, and then tries his much less impressive two-fisted hero bit on the cultists he has discovered, while he’s thwarted by their basic competence at being evil at every turn.

Turns out, the would-be macho guy may steal the female protagonist’s occult gaslighting tale right out of her hands, but that doesn’t mean he will not screw up her rescue rather badly, so that she has to bear the brunt of a film’s shock ending.

And it’s a really good shock ending, too, Coughlan hitting a nasty, disturbing and pretty cruel note with true creepy vigour, providing the movie with the true 70s (functionally, 1981 is still the 70s for horror) downer ending poor Alison doesn’t deserve, and which does make up for a scene or two too many of Peter flailing at the hero bit.

It’s certainly an interesting way to tell this particular story, though I do find the Alison-led half of the film more engaging. In part, because Samuel is simply a much better actress than Brown, in part because her slowly figuring out what’s going on with the people supposedly closest to her and trying to escape them without breaking the social contract is just thematically and emotionally much more resonant and engaging, dramatizing the horror of growing up very well indeed. Whereas the tale of an incompetent dude trying to save his girlfriend just doesn’t quite have the same interest.

There is still enough of interest going on in Peter’s half of the film to never make Alison’s Birthday boring, mind you, with some delightful moments of bizarre cult activity and a dollop of sequences of people doing research (which always delight me to no end) keeping things at the very least engaging throughout.