Cool title, crap film.
This has such a basic plot that I’ll knock it off straight away so I can spend more time on why this sucks.
After some rogue soldiers from the 1800s (1863 so we’re told), rob and slaughter some Southern soldiers depositing some cizzash in the local bank. This is the best scene in the movie, although unfortunately it really has next to nothing to do with the rest of the film and takes only 5 minutes. It is quite violent and has a couple of good gory effects.
The best part of the 1800s? Crazy facial hair, it seems most of the extras in the town were chosen based upon the length and complexity of their face fuzz, after this scene though none of the primary characters rock much more than carefully trimmed stubble.
Right, so the bad guys, 5 guys and one babe go on the run to Mexico, only night falls and they decide to stop off at an abandoned house on the edge of a cornfield. As they are coming to the edge of the cornfield something happens that I still don’t really get, they are rushed by a… thing, and one of the guys uses lightning reflexes to blow it away. Best as I can explain it looks like a smaller version of the Alien : Ripley baby from Alien Resurrection.
The rest of the movie is set over the ensuing night in the old house, and it is so horror cliché that I won’t bother explaining it.
After this finished I thought that it was an 1800s poor man’s version of Event Horizon, a crew are trapped in a confined space, and the scariness that ensues sorta makes them turn on each other.
Now a couple days later I think it is more like an alternate version of The Descent, where the first half is an unsettling caving trip gone wrong, but the second half is almost totally different, like a monster movie. Only the first half of Dead Birds is ordinary and the second half totally blows.
When you finally learn what the hell just happened it does make sense in a nonsensical way, but you won’t care because it is so poorly executed.
I thought everything and everyone looked a little too clean in the opening town scene, you know, a clean neck and some strategic streaks of dirt on one cheek. That was a concern, if the filmmaker decides not to bother with an authentic look, maybe they’ll be lazy in building suspense and delivering shocks, and let boring horror movie clichés do all the work for them, and they’re all here;
– A Flashback/Delusion/Dream, call it what you will, is the scariest part of the movie.
– People jump at shadows and all scares are comprised of something jumping towards camera accompanied by a loud music stab.
– Someone is missing, let’s spread out and look.
It is now maybe two nights since I watched Dead Birds, usually I have some scrawled notes with maybe a half page of points and reminders, and I let my memory do the rest, in this case I can’t remember the last two thirds of the film.
Final Rating – 5.5 / 10. It’s just not that good.
