The Birds II: Land's End (1994)

Plot Outline: A family decide to spend summer on an island but whilst they are there, birds start to attack the people.

The Review: The first thing I have to comment about this awful TV movie sequel is the director. The actual credit on the film is Alan Smithee but to name and shame him, I'm crediting the actual director Rick Rosenthal. For those of you unfamiliar, Alan Smithee is a well-used alias name taken on by directors who are too ashamed of their film for whatever reason to be given a proper credit. Now I'm not saying that Rosenthal thought this was a pile of a crap (well you don't need to think it, you know it is) and therefore removed his name from the credits. The film may have been cut or censored in some way and therefore he has some reason to disown it. However in my opinion, Rick Rosenthal should be ashamed of himself. He knows that he disowned this because it sucked. And you would too if you ever get the misfortune of watching it. Therefore it is my duty as a lover of decent films to credit him as the director because he isn't getting out of it that easily. I'm not a huge fan of the original but this is low. There is no reason for it to exist. It's shamelessly rips off most of the decent moments of the original and fails to generate any suspense, tension or eeriness that the original had. There are a couple of quite pointless side stories that try and fill the gaps in between the bird attacks, which are reasonably gory at times. Well I say bird attacks because usually the complete lack of birds means that's usually only a handful doing the attacking - no where near the flocks of birds that attacked in the original. It also lacks the suspense and eeriness of the original, as well as blatantly copying some scenes (barricading the house up for instance). Hell they even use the "mayor refuses to accept the presence of a monster because it will hurt the town's economy" plot which I'm bog sick of seeing. Tippi Hedren also shamelessly makes a cameo appearance as a totally unrelated character.

Final Verdict: This is just a completely horrible rehash of the original with loads of B movie clichés thrown in for good measure. Remaking and rehashing Hitchcock's classics can be done with certain degrees of success (some of the Psycho sequels weren't that bad) - you just need to have money, talent and passion to do it. Something that no one present here displays.

Rating: