Beaks: The Movie

Beaks: The Movie

A.K.A. – Ataque de los Pajaros (Attack of the Birds)

Spain/Mexico – 1987

Director – Rene Cardona Jr.

International Video Entertainment, 1987, VHS

 Run Time – 1 hour, 30 minutes

Smack!

From the intrepid Mexican biologist cum rogue scriptwriter/director who brought you the homoerotic Latin Jaws knockoff Tintorera: Tiger Shark comes another film with a full-colon in the title, this one an eco-disaster re-envisioning of The Birds. Where Hitchcock depended on sheer psychological terror and statistical visual illusion, Legacy director Rene Cardona Jr. banks on American "actors", the realism of stock nature photography, a stapler, and the pitching arms of several professional pigeon throwers.

Opening with the finest enucleation by bird-of-prey we’ve seen in the decade since Day of the Animals introduced us to such asinine ornithological antics, Beaks! quickly begins testing ones powers of logical conjunction. When a second attack, this one perpetrated by chickens, takes place, news reporter Vanessa (Michelle Johnson) is convinced, despite her employers totally not-sexually objectifying assessment of her (tits)ability to do actual (sex)reporting that there is some kind of connection between all this feathery antagonism. Dragging along her smart-ass boyfriend/cameraman Peter (Christopher Atkins), the pair do a leisurely and agonizing bickering/flirting-couple tour of stock bird photography scenes.

The casual viewer may have a hard time adding panoramic images of birds in flight to claustrophobic close-ups of pigeons smashing into the actors faces and coming up with horror as a sum, but if Christopher’s groan-inducing one-liners don’t provoke an anticipatory cringe or two, just think of the birds. They must be terrified.

Both of these European VHS covers are from the Cinehound Forum.