ALISON’S BIRTHDAY (1979)
Article 1914 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-11-2006
Posting Date: 11-8-2006
Directed by Ian Coughlan
Featuring Joanne Samuel, Lou Brown, Bunny Brooke

A young woman is called home for a special party for her nineteenth birthday, an event which she’d been thinking of avoiding due to a message from a seance she’d received years earlier. She heads home with her boyfriend, but finds that something sinister is going on…

In many ways, I quite like this Australian horror movie. The acting is quite good throughout, the characters are thoroughly likable, they act with a certain degree of intelligence (most of the time), and it goes for subtle scares rather than big shocks; the movie is, in fact, bloodless.

However, it has a real problem in the fact that the story is utterly predictable. There’s not a single surprise among the various revelations, and it ends pretty much as I expected a horror movie from this era to end. It is this utter lack of surprises that drags the movie down; even if you enjoy some of the touches, there’s really nothing to the story that you haven’t seen before. As a result of all this, it’s both a little better than expected and a disappointment as well.