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Tuesday 11 October 2011

Burl reviews Beaks: The Movie! (1987)


Hi, Burl here with another animal attack movie! This one originated in Mexico, I think, but, like the similar Slugs, uses a couple of American actors in the lead roles and fills out many of the supporting parts with Hispanic players! Anyway, if you don’t mind dubbing it works out pretty well!

This one is about killer birds of course, much like Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds! It’s pretty similar in that no solid reason is given for the avian aggression; though human pollution is rather heavy-handedly mentioned as a potential motive! Also there’s a long sequence at the beginning where a bearded fellow blasts away at pigeons in slow motion, which is kind of gross and mean if you have any admiration for these clever birds at all! Many city dwellers do not, I understand, but it still seems sort of cruel!

But the bearded huntsman gets his pretty quickly! An owl swoops out of nowhere and plucks his eye right out of his head! In the meantime, there are slow-motion bird attacks here and there, and the heroes of the movie – a newscaster who’s tired of doing the silly and unimportant stories she is always assigned, and her goofy cameraman boyfriend – travel the world to investigate the unusual events! They seem to work for a local news station, but their travel budget appears to be more or less unlimited! Ha ha, I’ve worked for much bigger networks than that, and let me tell you, they don’t dole out travel vouchers on a crazy hunch!

But never mind that: what about the bird attacks? Ha ha, some of them are pretty great, like when the old farmer is attacked by chickens, or all the kids at a birthday party get some new feathered friends! (I know, that happened in The Birds also, but hey, ha ha!) Also I seem to recall a hang glider finding out the hard way that man was not meant to fly!

There’s not much else going on in the movie! It’s only been a short time since I watched it, and I can’t remember how it ends! I think it just ends, actually! There’s no real conclusion or solution for the bird revolution, and since that’s more or less what Hitch did too, it seems like a bit of a cheat! Hey, rip everything else off from the old pudge, sure, but leave him his special head-scratcher of an ending!

This is actually the second time I’ve seen this movie, I’m slightly ashamed to say! I seem to recall watching it back in high school! Of course I didn’t remember anything about that viewing either, ha ha! But between the goofiness and the gore, there’s amusement to be had with this crazy picture, so I’ll award it one and a half arrogant sportsmen!

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