Review: Beaks (1987)
Oh, wow, this is a gloriously awful movie. Christopher Atkins (star of The Blue Lagoon, A Night in Heaven, and The Pirate Movie) and Michelle Johnson (of the execrable Blame it on Rio as well as Waxwork and Death Becomes Her) star as a TV reporter and her cameraman who investigate a series of bird attacks.
Said bird attacks mostly consist of people being in rooms with a bunch of pigeons flying around. The pigeons fly, the people cover their faces with their arms and scream, and then there’s a closeup of a real pigeon pecking a fake face or a fake pigeon pecking a real face.
There are long sequences with secondary characters trying to hide from murderous pigeons, and there are a few decent set pieces, and if you’ve seen Hitchcock’s The Birds, you know how this ends.
A lot of low-budget horror movies achieve cult status because they’re charmingly inept, but that’s not really the case here. I mean, writer/director Rene Cardona Jr. clearly didn’t know how to build suspense or write a coherent script (which is surprising in light of the fact that he directed 99 movies in his life and this was 25 years into his career), but the actors are competent across the board, and while the dialogue doesn’t exactly sparkle, most of it isn’t laughably bad.
And while the gore isn’t spectacular, it’s serviceable, and it is fun to root for the killer pigeons. It was on Freevee and worth every cent I paid to watch it!