Birds of Prey (1987) (aka Beaks)

Plot Outline: A news reporter and her cameraman head to Spain to investigate a farmer and his wife being attacked by his chickens. It turns out that this isn't an isolated incident and a whole town was wiped out 30 years ago by birds. Now they're back and hungry for more.

The Review: Hitchcock has a lot to answer for. Not only has his classic horror been given a horrid sequel, it's been ripped off countless times and probably none as worse as René Cardona Jr's Birds of Prey. Second rate rip-offs don't get any more blatant than this. There's a terrible cast (the two leads, Atkins and Johnson, are atrocious, although Johnson is cute), the dubbing is laughable, there's some hilarious dialogue about man's treatment of nature and nearly everyone mentions that the birds seemed to be organised. Of course, most of Hitchcock's film is ripped off. There's the growing sense that the birds are massing against man. The birds attack a group of children, here at a party. There's even a "siege" inside a house. Only where Hitchcock actually managed to create fear from birds attacking people, here you just have to laugh as pigeons and doves don't make the most threatening enemies. The "attack" scenes follow the same formula each time instead of varying it: there's plenty of slow-motion shots of birds flying through the air and actors being mobbed by birds. In most cases the actors are simply thrust into a room full of birds and told to act scared. In fact plenty of times it looks like the birds are actually embarrassed to be on the camera. Take for instance the scene where the farmer and his wife are attacked. The guy is clearly holding the birds as they swarm him on the floor and as he falls, you can see birds struggling to break free. In fact I bet a lot of the birds died here because the actors clearly don't care about falling on top of them or crushing them against the wall as they wave about.

Final Verdict: Birds of Prey is a z-grade rip-off where pigeons rip people's eyes out and doves menacingly organise themselves to destroy man. Classic films have a lot to answer for when shameless rip-offs stoop this low.

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