TCM Underground: "Bloody Birthday" (1981)

A particularly sinister addition to the early 80's slasher canon ("Halloween", "My Bloody Valentine", "Prom Night"), "Bloody Birthday" is certainly bloody, albeit the importance of a certain calendar date is widely misrepresented. 
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I say that because this devilish pre-teen suburban horror thriller, which vilifies three ten year-old children born during a total solar eclipse, has little to do with their actual birthday. These deadly pranksters seem perfectly happy to kill - stab, shoot, strangle - no matter the date. 
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Logic aside, the effectiveness of "Bloody Birthday" has a great deal to do with the unflinching manner in which its three brutal brats perform their deeds, the relative ease in which they do so and just how much fun they seem to be having in the process. (One particular scene has the ringleader of the group, no more taller than a kitchen counter, suppressing the gunfire through his coat as he smirks and shoots down his gradeschool teacher.)
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The targets at the mercy of their meteorological insanity seem mostly at random, (two teenagers smooching in a cemetery get offed in the first few scenes with those annoying parents and siblings coming later) yet the unmeasured, unmotivated attacks (delivered without much room for tongue-in-cheek trappings) is what lends the film its teeth. 
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Directed by Ed Hunt, a B-movie genre filmmaker if there ever was one, "Bloody Birthday" doesn't exhibit any worthwhile or memorable moments of genuine filmmaking artistry (most of the killings take place in broad daylight in drab, staid settings, the bold red blood applied only once the camera can assess the damage) but what we have here is quantity over quality. Where else can you see a ten year-old girl kill her dad with a baseball bat one minute and then take a bow-and-arrow to her sister's skull the next? [B-]