Flu Birds (2008)
- Andrew Smith
- 20 minutes ago
- 5 min read
"If they fly, you die."
Plot
A group of juvenile offenders on a rehabilitation camping trip are terrorised by a flock of birds which have been mutated by some sort of disease. The disease can be passed on to humans - if their victims survive long enough!
Review
Imagine you are a studio executive, sitting in a sleek boardroom staring at the front page of a newspaper, and you see a headline about a terrifying existential and completely invisible threat, a new global virus. Specifically in this case, the avian flu or more commonly known as bird flu. A light bulb goes off inside your head and now your entire job is to figure out how to take that invisible microscopic terror spread by birds and somehow turn it into a profitable, visually stimulating monster movie. How on earth do you monetize a cough? What is the visual representation of a respiratory infection? Well, if you're Sy Fy, the answer is incredibly simple: you just make the birds really, really big. And then you have them rip people's intestines out in a film called Flu Birds. Ironically, I wrote this review many, many years ago and now I’ve come back to revisit my older reviews and pad them out a bit more, we’ve had the Coronavirus pandemic since. And low and behold, someone went and made Corona Zombies! So, it seems those studio executives are still working overtime!
By the time Flu Birds made it to the small screen, the avian flu scare was long gone, and it was something else dominating the news (maybe swine flu, so killer pigs will be on the menu soon!). It just highlights this relentless single studio machinery where networks are trying to constantly synthesize our current news cycle into cheap weekend afternoon creature features. That business model creates a very specific set of cinematic problems. When you are churning out content that fast and just relying on a title or tagline to sell the film, you don't invest in long-term narrative development. If the studios miss their cultural window, such as here where the avian flu film came out when nobody cared about avian flu anymore, then they lose their built-in marketing hook. Suddenly, the film must stand on its own two feet and to rely on a strong story and compelling characters to survive the runtime. Do you honestly think Flu Birds has a strong story and compelling characters to make up for the lag time? Of course not.
I’ll give the film a bit of credit to begin with as it gets straight to the point within the opening few minutes as the ‘birds’ are on screen almost from the get-go by dispatching a pair of hunters in the woods. But the film dispenses with any story, characters or logic by doing so and resorts to plenty of lazy mechanics to get some exposition shoehorned in there. My eyes rolled when the offenders are all give character tropes purely defined by their past crimes including one being a prostitute and one being a computer hacker who got into the FBI's systems. I don't see why their crimes should be relevant to anything apart from labelling their foreheads with a single character trait – for instance, you know the prostitute is the token slut character because of her sexual nature and thus when she removes her top later in the film, it's expected. The fact that one of them hacked into the FBI is completely irrelevant when they’re being chased by killer birds and has no bearing on the story outside of lazy writing. The only character of note here is played by Sarah Butler who is not only cute but at least gives her ‘final girl’ character some common sense and reason. On the opposite side to that we have Jonathon Trent really pushing the wrong buttons as the ‘I don't care about anyone except me’ jackass who lasts way too long in the film. Lance Guest is in here too and I'm guessing he's the token ‘star name’ that these films have to put on the front cover (but star name is pushing it). I’m guessing he needs the work after Jaws, The Revenge pretty much killed his career. But he doesn't do a lot except drive around in a jeep so its easy money. Rounding off the cast is the usual array of Eastern European actors with really dodgy accents. I've stressed this in the past but I HATE having the supporting cast being local actors who can't speak English very well and sound like they are trying to win an Oscar. Just keep them to non-speaking parts please!
Flu Birds is such a misleading title too as the crow-looking feathered freak on the front cover looks nothing like the pterodactyl-like monstrosities on display here. They are a mixture of CGI and puppetry (and even looking like guys in rubber suits at times) and to be honest, they don't look that bad. I'll at least give the film some props for using something ‘real’ and creating the puppets. I don't get quite how they have been mutated into these pterodactyls but at least they're hungry, if somewhat stupid. It is highly likely the effects studio either already had a digital asset for a pterodactyl from a previous dinosaur flick they worked on, or they literally just had the physical moulds lying around and went with them. The ‘birds’ are well fed throughout the film but aren't used nearly as much as they should have been. The deaths are pretty gory which is a big plus and entrails and intestines are regularly pulled out by their sharp claws and peaks.
Bizarrely, Flu Birds runs almost like two separate films for the bulk of the running time. Obviously there's the plot about the offenders being attacked in the woods and trying to escape and survive. But then there's also a 28 Days Later-like story about the flu breaking out in a hospital and it having to be quarantined. The two run side-by-side for little purpose other than to show the audience that these birds can kill you in two ways: rip you apart or give you some deadly disease. It would have been better had the infected people turn into zombies or something but they just die slowly and horribly which means a lot of scenes of nurses and doctors and dodgy government officials running around trying to cover everything up without starting a panic. I think this part of the film is just to bulk up the running time. The two plots eventually come together at the end when the government wants to destroy the birds and the teenagers must get out of the woods before it's too late. But unfortunately for them, it's way too late in the running time to make a difference.
Final Verdict
Flu Birds is yet another terrible entry into the never-ending slew of Sy Fy releases. It had odd moments of entertainment and I like seeing ‘real’ monsters as opposed to CGI. But when the story is this weak, the acting is this poor and the whole piece smacks of desperately trying to cash in on a real-life flu scare, then the only thing to do with this flu outbreak is contain it - do not spread this film to your friends whatever you do!
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Flu Birds Also Known As: Flu Bird Horror Director(s): Leigh Scott Writer(s): Brian Smith (screenplay), Tony Daniel (screenplay) Actor(s): Clare Carey, Lance Guest, Jonathon Trent, Sarah Butler, Rebekah Kochan, Bill Posley, Brent Lydic, Gabriel Costin Duration: 89 mins |  |
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