Actually, “Happy Death Day” is really more of a campus slasher comedy, with the premise of wake up, get killed, repeat, borrowed from “Groundhog Day”, the 1993 movie where Bill Murray gets caught in a time warp and which has just been re-interpreted last year in “Edge of Tomorrow” with Tom Cruise and earlier this year in “Before I Fall”, which was based on a novel for young adults.
The lead character now is Tree (Jessica Rother), who wakes up on the morning of her birthday with a big hangover in the bed in the dorm room of a nerdy student, Carter (Israel Broussard). She tells him not to tell anyone she slept with him as her reputation with her sorority sisters will be ruined. That evening, on her way to a party, she is chased and stabbed to death by a masked killer.
Things get dumb and dumber along the way and all these shenanigans would be fairly tolerable if only Tree is a character we can sympathize with. The problem is she is such a self centered bitch and a shameless slut that, at one point, we really wish she’d die for good already. She treats other people like a true mean girl, avoids her own dad and is guiltlessly having an affair with her married professor, so why would we care for her at all? The whole experience helps to give her some life lessons that make her a better, more sensitive person along the way, to give her some redemption, but still, we don’t respect her at all.
