Birds of Prey

What a stupendous movie. So bad in every way that it is flat out hilarious. As someone else wrote - concerns over ACTUAL birds being harmed or killed during the making of this epic. Oh yeah! No doubt about it. You can actually see a crew member's hand in one shot throwing a bird at an actor. In other scenes to make it look like the PIGEONS are swarming a victim you can see the poor things have their feet tied or stapled to the actor's costume. Sheesh! Plus you can tell the money people behind the film told the director we need nudity (check) gore (check) a long para-sailing scene with a Thompson Twins late 1980's pop sound song (check) explosion (got it) and slo-mo shots of children in danger (you betcha)! This mess is very funny even though it doesnt mean to be. For lovers of Grade Z classics - check of BEAKS! Two Claws Up!

It's hard to condone a film that starts off with some muppet shooting pigeons for sport, but this film is so overwhelmingly stupid that it's hard not to enjoy it. Basically, it's The Birds only made by Spaniards and Italians. Which is probably why it starts with a guy shooting pigeons.

Basically, the birds are annoyed that man is damaging the Earth and are now looking for payback. Although we have countless shot of Flamingoes, Storks, seagulls etc any time there's a mass bird attack the films uses pigeons. You know, one of the least threatening birds of all. Fair enough, a couple of eagles show up to pull people's eyeballs out but it's pigeons all the way for this film.

You've got a reporter and her cameraman seemingly travelling all over the world trying to get to the bottom of all these bird attacks (and failing miserably) while interviewing people who've been attacked, like Aldo Sambrell and another guy who had an eyeball stolen by an eagle. Also the guy who was the husband of the junkie girl in the Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue is in this for about five minutes.

But what makes it so enjoyable? The bad acting, fluffed lines, the scene where the pigeons 'eavesdrop' on our heroes, the crap ending and the even crapper (but most welcome) epilogue. What about the guy having a heart attack in the middle of a bird attack? I can just imagine some Spanish racing pigeon enthusiast being bunged a couple of grand only to watch in horror as his pigeons are thrown at confused actors trying to look terrified. They probably just poured breadcrumbs all over everything too.

These include:

1.) Bad dubbing and phonetically challenged foreign actors.

2.) A TV news story entitled "Attack of the Killer Chickens!"

3.) Close-ups of birds pecking faces apart and pulling out eyeballs, leaving only blood-squirting empty black sockets.

4.) Gratuitous slow-mo flying and attack scenes.

5.) A dense globe-trotting blonde couple who take time out from the carnage for a PG-rated bubblebath/champagne kissy kissy session.

6.) Snappy dialogue reducing a worldwide epidemic of bird attacks to "feathered mutiny."

7.) An annoying little brat who runs outside during the middle of a bird ambush just to get her greedy little hands on a party horn...leading to several unnecessary deaths.

8.) Christopher Atkins talking to his penis.

In case you haven't caught on, this is a low-grade rip off of the 1963 classic which cuts back and forth, from different countries to different people running away from someone offscreen throwing pigeons at them. American actors Michelle Johnson and Atkins are in the main segment about TV reporters who travel around investigating various attacks only to get ravaged on a train, but the story also covers a bickering couple, their two kids and a girl in a bikini attacked at a beach and people at a children's birthday party (there's even a little Veronica Cartwright knock-off named Cathy!).

This film was also released as BIRDS OF PREY and was an international production that was filmed in Spain, Peru, Italy, Mexico, Morocco and Puerto Rico!

Score: 3 out of 10 (for scattered laughs)

Oh, no, another italian low-budget saga! This movie is awful. The Director Rene Cardona Jr. has no idea how to work with his own script and these so-called "actors". The characters are unbelivably cardboard, the plot is weak, this movie is probably the worst remake ever made!

My review was written in October 1987 after watching the movie on International Video Entertainment video cassette.

"Beaks", originally titled "Birds of Prey", is a very silly and very gory imitation of Alfred Hitchcokc's "The Birds". Direct-to-video packaging lampoons the film, but it's too boring to acquire the implied camp status.

Michelle Johnson (of "Blame It on Rio") toplines as a European tv newshen (pun intended) assigned by her callous boss to cover silly stories involving birds. (She complains she's a journalism school grad who wants hard news assignments, to no avail.) Accompanied by her cameraman (Christopher Atkins), she reports on a marksman who shoots birds while he is blindfolded and then covers a "feathered mutiny" of killer chickens who pecked their owner.

Meanwhile, birds of many feathers are attacking humans all over the world, duly photographed on location in Spain, Puerto Rico, Peru, Morocco, Rome and Mexico. There's a lot of gore and pithy philosophical speculation (copying Hitchcock) on why the attacks are occurring. Consensus is that instinctually the birds are trying to survive by killing off man, who has been polluting the environment. As in Hitch's classic, the birds suddenly stop at film's end, cuing an idiotic final shot of what looks like insects or tiny flying fish getting ready at a lake for a sequel.

Mexican filmmaker Rene Cardona Jr., best known Stateside for his poor taste epic "Survive", takes time off from helming Mexican sex comedies like "Buenas y con... Movidas" to pilot this farrago. He keeps repeating boring transition shots of flocks of birds in flight and dubs the supporting cast while the leads speak English. Acting is weak, with voluptuous Johnson given a relatively flat-chested body double for the requisite nude scenes.