A macabre title for a blog post, I’ll admit – but, don’t worry, it’s a happy story.

It also kind of reinforces the point I’ll make here – you may have had a lot of preconceptions of this from the title, but it’s different from what you think…

In my last post I spoke about how disappointment can strike at any time. Such as walking through London only to find a massive statue of Jeff Goldblum isn’t there…

… but here I’m talking about the other kind of surprise. The good one.

So let me set the scene. It’s a Tuesday night. It’s too hot to sleep. I’m alone in my room with the sounds of London drifting through the cracked window. A candle flickers atop of a cabinet in the corner and I’m scrolling through Now TV to find something to watch.

Does anyone else find that, while these streaming services give us a plethora of choices, they also make us incredibly indecisive?

At least back in the day when TV schedules reigned supreme it took away hours of fruitless flicking and soulless scrolling.

I narrowed my choices down to some of the shorter films and found one that ran for an hour and a half. The title was ‘Happy Death Day’ – which, in my humble opinion, is a terrible title.

I was about to flick past it when something about the synopsis caught my eye. Apparently it was like Groundhog Dog meets Friday the 13th.

Now, Groundhog Day is a great movie… but I’m no slasher film fan. Yet still, against my better judgement I gave it a go.

The opening titles rolled and… within seconds I was hooked!

Against all the odds it was good. and deserves its 7/10 rating on IMDB.

(Look out for a great lead performance by Jessica Rothe, who you may recognise from La La Land)

Who knew, though?

Everything about it made me want to skip it, but curiosity got the better of me and I’m glad it did. That age old saying ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ held true.

Although, I do think they need to reconsider that title – I recommended it to a friend and when I mentioned the title his first comment was; ‘sounds grim’.

How would I market it?

Maybe Groundhog Dog meets Alfred Hitchcock.

It takes away the stigma we have around slasher films, yet also hints that viewers will be in for some killer scenes.

Check it out!

by Ashley Brown

featured photo: looper.com

other image: Business Insider