Falco Terror

Broadcast journalist Michelle Johnson (as Vanessa Cartwright) and cameraman Christopher Atkins (as Peter) stumble upon the story of the century - BIRDS, formerly our feathered friends, have taken a foul turn! They are attacking people all over the world! The cute shirt-shedding blonde couple track the mostly pesky pigeons as they make mince meat out of people's faces. As the attacks increase, you get less of Ms. Johnson and Mr. Atkins showing their chests, and more pigeon poking.

A real trouper, Mr. Atkins manages to utter the line, "We're sitting ducks," with a straight face.

"I know what we saw was awful, but it's over," says Salvador Pineda when he thinks he's escaped from danger. Not so fast. That could be your reaction after seeing this Rene Cardona Jr. homage to Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" (1963). There are some promising scenes, but the pace and editing are astonishingly bad - perhaps no editing was done, and Mr. Cardona tried to make a movie with the footage he had. And, it looks like they used up a lot of pigeons during production.

** Beaks (10/87) Rene Cardona Jr. ~ Michelle Johnson, Christopher Atkins, Sonia Infante, Salvador Pineda

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.

I just watched this film...no kidding I mean I JUST watched it. The credits rolled less then a minute ago before I stopped the DVD and ran to my computer. This film is absolutely dreadful, awful. No, it's worse then that. 'Awful' is a good description of a bad film. But this movie is deserving of some other word and I don't know what it is. It isn't just bad, while watching the film I found myself grinding my teeth and hurling obscenities in rage and frustration. From the very beginning with the 9 minute handgliding sequence which amounts to...NOTHING, this film had me...p*ssed. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. How can anything on Earth be so horrible on so many levels? This film blatantly abuses the slo-mo sequence, especially in places that don't need to be slo-mo'd. In fact, I wager that if you played all the slo-mo footage at normal speed along with the rest of the film...the film would run about 30 minutes. The main story is about a (sometimes naked) reporter and her faithful lapdog--er...cameraman. But for some reason 80% of the flick revolves around 8 or 9 groups of people in 'bird peril', WHY?????????????? I'm not exactly sure how to express my feelings on this film correctly. I have nothing but absolute contempt for the cast and crew responsible for this travesty... ARGHHHHH!!!!!!!

Rene Cardona Jr.'s spin on Hitchcock's THE BIRDS isn't just a bad movie – it's an incredibly trashy one, seemingly made with little regard for quality, coherence, editing or linear storytelling. Plenty of effort has been made to give the movie an international feel – parts of it were filmed in North and South America as well as Europe – and all that effort goes to waste in what is nothing more than a schlocky Z-grade attempt to emulate greatness. It has the same kind of quality to it as something like Bruno Mattei's ZOMBIE CREEPING FLESH, except without the fun factor.

Things do kick off on a good note, with an ultra-gruesome moment involving an eagle. There are some hilarious attacks of people being 'ambushed' by birds achieved by somebody chucking pigeons, off camera, at the cast members! Then the film loses it and turns into a rambling narrative, setting up about five different sets of characters for an hour or so before throwing them into siege situations: a party attacked; a camper van seeking refuge; a train at the mercy of flocking winged terror. None of this is as interesting as it sounds, and the gore effects are in short supply, limited to a few scratches on the back of people's hands and on their faces.

Christopher Atkins and Michelle Johnson are set up as the nominal protagonists – a female reporter covering the avian crime and her cameraman sidekick. There's even some body-double nudity and a cheesy sex scene thrown in. However, these guys have little to do in the film and their acting absolutely sucks, with the kind of awful dubbing you expect from late '80s Spanish and Italian flicks. There's no characterisation anywhere in the film, and aside from a brief cameo from Italian star Gabriele Tinti, no interest from the varied cast.

In the end the film becomes overwhelming senseless, with more pigeons being chucked about than is strictly necessary; there's an exploding eagle and some annoyingly whiny kids around too, including the most irritating little red-haired girl whose awful scream leads you to hope that a pigeon will fly down and pluck out her throat! No such luck. Cardona made a long string of Mexican exploitation movies, but this is one of his very worst. It's not the worst I've seen, though; it may be an absolutely diabolical film, but like Z-grade trash such as THE ABOMINATION, it's never boring.