Alison's Birthday (1981)★★★★☆

Okay, okay, I have to be honest, a four-star rating is kind of misleading here.

(Spoilers ahead)

This movie starts out strong - I mean, Australian teenagers calling out my name before getting violently crushed? I love it.

And it has an interesting story! I love that Alison is feeling a bit weird about the whole thing, and asks Pete to go with her. I love that Pete just doesn’t give up the whole time, and goes digging and digging.

But a lot of the middle of the film feels like a slog to get through. If you could take the first twenty minutes of the film and the last twenty minutes of the film as is, and watch everything else at 1.5x, maybe it’s an actually four-star film.

But I’ll tell you, that final scene and final chyron made me laugh out loud and I knew I couldn’t lie to myself and rate this any lower.