Thursday, April 17, 2008

The Birds

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

This is a little embarassing to admit, but I had never seen all of Alfred Hitchock's The Birds until last night. I know, right? WTF? It's been on my secret list-of-shame for many years now, right up there with It's a Wonderful Life. I try to change the subject when people bring these movies up. In fact, forget I said anything. Post over.






Just kidding. Actually, having now finally seen The Birds, I no longer feel embarassed about not having seen it sooner. Why? Because it turns out it's one of the very few Hitchcock movies that I didn't like.

That's right.

I cannot for the life of me understand why this is one his his best known films. The first half of the movie has to be the most boring thing Hitchcock ever put to film. It's a series of conversations between boring, unlikable, unfunny characters, stirring up some very mild drama that doesn't even really pay off later in the film. I mean, great characters aren't a must for a good thriller/horror movie, but Hitchcock almost always made them at least a little interesting.

Then, once the birds finally start attacking, I guess the movie gets more interesting, but I just found it ineffective and maybe a little silly. Birds aren't scary. And let me just get this out of the way... animals-gone-crazy movies are almost never actually scary. For one to be enjoyable, it usually has to be some violent, silly horror movie that's more fun than anything else. It should be like Slugs. It's a terrible, unscary movie, but there's a part where a naked teenage couple falls into a pile of slugs and are eaten alive. Then later, some guy accidentally eats a slug, and little tiny slugs grow in his body until eventually his face explodes and tiny slugs shoot out while he's in the middle of eating at a restaurant. That's what I go to the movies to see.

The Birds takes a frankly unscary premise and treats it as dark and serious as possible. Hitchcock movies aren't really ever realistic or anything, but man does he try to make a stupid idea seem terrifying. It even has a dark, unsettling, ambiguous ending. In a movie about stupid seagulls getting mad and pecking everybody. It doesn't help that some (a lot) of the special effects don't hold up today, and a lot of it looks corny.

There are probably isolated moments and shots that I admired, but when this movie wasn't boring me silly, it was making my eyes sore from how often I was rolling them. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood, I dunno. It's better than Tree Dogs.

3 comments:

Paul said...

Oh Dan...

Its not about the birds attacking, its about women leaving the home and entering the workforce. Such things upset the balance of nature, y'know.

Tippi Hedron's line, "I'm neither poor nor innocent," seals the deal.
Its all, "Take THAT phallacracy! I don't care if the world's gonna get all befouled by my liberation...move to Saudi Arabia if you don't like it, fuckers!" Y'know, something like that...

But I guess social commentary is pretty boring in suspense / horror. Even if its slightly imagined. Sometimes a slug is just a slug - and I agree that its probably better that way.
-PTB

Paul said...

Oh wait, then there's this one:
Cathy: Mitch, can I bring the lovebirds in here?
Lydia: No!
Cathy: But Mom, they're in a cage.
Lydia: They're birds, aren't they?
Mitch: Let's leave them in the kitchen, huh honey?

Yeah, lets.

Dan said...

Well, congrats on going over my head here. I didn't get any of what you said while watching the movie, although that may be because of how frightfully bored I was with the characters.

I'm actually a big fan of social commentary in horror movies (Dawn of the Dead, 28 Weeks Later, stuff like that) and think it should be done more often. A lot of horror flicks/thrillers exploit certain elements of social unrest going on at the time, with many of the most memorable ones having some sort of zeitgeist-y feel to it (Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), but maybe not enough go the extra mile and try to do a little commentary.