It’s me, it’s me, it’s Erin B and I’m 50 years old today. I will admit, because I can say anything I want on this space I’m paying to use, that I thought I would have achieved something more significant in the year running up to this milestone birthday, like losing some weight, or rejoining the workforce after 20 years as a stay-at-home-mom. I knew I didn’t have a bunch of friends to throw me one of those birthdays you see on TV, but the reality probably is that more people spend their birthday alone and crying than they do being honored in public by a group of people who somehow all get along with each other. Or somewhere in between.

OK, I’ve been a little bit emotional because for some reason I’ve been excited about this day for a year, and then it dawned on me that this birthday isn’t any more significant to anyone else than all the others, but not because I am bummed out about getting this old. I’m not bummed out at all. Being 50 means I didn’t die in my 40s of cancer, in my case.

And I always have hope for the future, even the future of the immediate kind. I think hope is the most beautiful emotion that can show on someone’s face. It’s my favorite thing about myself, the fact that I always have hope, and it usually manifests in me trying to learn something. And I realized that I can make this whole year into a celebration of my half-century, by working on doing one of the things I like most but somehow don’t do enough: blogging! So let’s get into it.

My irrational dream of a special birthday should have been quashed by all the horrible birthdays we’ve seen in films and TV. Can I make a list off the top of my head? I only decided to do this post today.

I don’t know how to make a list without WordPress indenting it and I don’t like that so I’m just going to make a list without numbers. First of all, the best example has to be Sally’s birthday in Demons 2. Things start to go wrong for Sally when she realizes one of the guests has invited a group of troublemakers in a car. These people are the counterparts for the group in the car in Demons 1, the ones who do a lot of coke and let the demons out of the theater to take over the world, so we can guess any number of things they might have done to Sally. She hides in her room and a demon comes out of the TV, then she transforms and attacks all her friends.

Then there’s Spookies. A kid runs away from home because his parents forget his birthday, finds a birthday party set up in an abandoned mansion, and gets buried alive after being attacked by a monster. I know Spookies is a Frankenmovie that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but there’s a scene where an animated corpse talks to the kid and then falls limp that definitely creeps me out.

Alison’s Birthday is an impressing but depressing low budget 80s Australian horror movie. This one played a lot on HBO as I recall, so it was probably one of the first horror movies I saw. Alison finds out that her destiny is for her body to be taken over by an ancestor of hers, a dickhead who just stays forever young by stealing bodies every time she or he or it gets old. Alison runs and runs and doesn’t get away. It’s easy to get invested in this movie, and it’s one of those I know is good and yet I don’t want to rewatch it but about every decade or so. I get too involved in movies. I’m the same way with video games. Imagination.

The Game is a cringe action adventure. Michael Douglas gets a special gift: a surprise birthday paranoia manhunt from what I believe is his jealous brother? To be honest mostly what I remember is a frustrated Douglas saying something like it’s nobody’s business what he does in his private life, even if he wants to buttfuck Captain Kangaroo. But that line was so memorable and funny after 25 years that I had to include it. Also stars Deborah Kara Unger, who I liked in her 90s film appearances. And this other guy Sean Penn, who I have never liked as an actor and whose work I will avoid if at all possible. Fun fact.

Happy Birthday To Me has to have a mention. What I remember most about this is that nobody comes to Melissa Sue Anderson’s original party because they’re all snobs, and her mother gets so mad that she offers the viewers the following Raspberry-quality line, “I’m a rich woman now, and I’ve got to shove it in their faces!” Right before she drives her car off a bridge or something. And the movie was one of Glenn Ford’s slummin’ horror appearances, the late career horror appearance being one example of a habit of Old Hollywood stars which I quite enjoyed. (See Also Bette Davis in Burnt Offerings, Ava Gardner in The Sentinel, yada yada.) Also, the real killer was on my grandmother’s favorite soap opera which pretty much made it my favorite, Y&R.

Madhouse, 1981. An Italian slasher, the best kind of slasher, one of the 80s ones they pretend is American, set very close to my hometown in coastal Georgia. Again, as in HBTM, dead people around a table in party hats.

Sixteen Candles. A girl’s family forgets her birthday because her insufferable sister is getting married to the janitor from the Breakfast Club, then 90 minutes of wall-to-wall atrocities. I don’t usually like to point out how movies of the past don’t fit the social attitudes of the present, but you really, really could not make this movie today. It would just be the opening credits followed by the closing credits. Either that or it would star Dwayne The Rock Johnson in a red wig being pursued by Jack Black, who would be trying to smell what the Rock is cooking at the school dance.

Smile. I felt so sorry for the main character. She didn’t mean to do that to her cat. She didn’t KNOW she did that to her cat. Not only did the cat disappear, but she’s actually sick and no one believes her when the cat is then spectacularly found at the birthday party in question. She needs someone to save her from the monster, and all they see when they look at her IS the monster. And that is a metaphor about depression.

The Sixth Sense. Trapped in cabinets, trapped in cabinets…with ghosts. As with Smile, not the protagonist’s birthday party, but results in them being humiliated at a birthday party they bravely tried to attend although not really being up for it.

Bridget Jones’s Diary. The man of her dreams helps her salvage a birthday dinner at which her cooking skills turn the food blue. Then her drunk ex FWB shows up and there’s a fight! A real fight!

The Room. The whole plot of this film is that there’s going to be a party, and it’s the worst party ever in the worst movie ever. Let’s go outside, no inside, no outside. She’s cheating on you. I don’t even like him anymore. I’m getting fed up with this wol-rud.

Well, I guess this list goes to eleven. I’ve just found out that my lunch plans have changed from something I didn’t want to do in the first place to something unknown. It’s up to me to make something out of this year of mine.