I've managed to avoid seeing this movie over the years. I've seen most of Hitchcock's work over the years, my mom made sure I saw some of his movies when I was younger because she considered them classics, but this one and Psycho were too much like horror movies for her, so she wouldn't let us watch them, and I just never got around to watching this one. It seemed really ridiculous as an idea for a movie. Suddenly all the birds in the world start attacking the people, mass chaos ensues? I don't know about this movie, but I guess we'll find out when I watch it today. Let's see what I think.
In this movie, Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren, meets Mitch Brenner, played by Rod Taylor, in a San Francisco pet store and decides to follow him home. She brings with her a gift for Mitch: two lovebirds, and the two strike up an unlikely romance. One day, Mitch's sister decides to throw a party, and for some reason birds start attacking children at the party. Soon a huge assault starts on the town by attacking birds. Will Mitch and Melanie be able to survive the onslaught of mysterious bird attacks?
Boy, when Hitchcock wanted to he could create for himself some unlikable characters. Melanie is a prissy stuck-up jerk, and Mitch is an arrogant twat. I'm officially rooting for the birds in this movie. It also takes a long time for things to get going. it's over an hour before anything concrete actually happens in this movie, which reminds me of Psycho, but it doesn't take a whole hour for everything to finally start happening in that movie. I can see why people would get sick of waiting for something to happen and give up on this movie.
it takes an hour and 52 minutes before the first death happens in this movie, and it happens off camera, though it's gruesome enough with someone's eyes pecked out by birds. Honestly, my mom may have thought this was too much of a horror movie, but if she really wanted to keep us from watching this movie it would be more accurate to say this movie is too boring for your kids to watch rather than saying it's too horrifying. At least Melanie gets a little better at this point of the movie and she isn't so selfish anymore, but actually starts doing things to help the other characters, so I can see why someone would want to be in a relationship with her. Mitch isn't in the movie much at this point, so he doesn't have a chance to redeem himself here, but with the birds finally attacking in force there's enough going on to distract me from worrying about what a jerk he is.
The action is still choppy at this point, there will be a scary bird attack, then a bunch of people talking, then another bird attack, then a lot of talking again, and during the talking parts it gets pretty frustrating waiting for something to happen. There's one scene in particular that takes place in a diner with all the adults arguing whether it makes sense for birds to be attacking humans, and this goes on for ten minutes before anything happens again, and it's very frustrating hearing people speculating whether birds would really attack people when we know that the birds are attacking people because we've seen it happen. Arguing isn't going to help, but that's what people do, they argue. If this movie happened today people would be arguing on facebook about the bird attacks while everything burned down around them. While the bird attacks are happening, the movie is interesting enough, but the long periods of down time between attacks can get really boring. I guess that's just the nature of a movie like this. There's a scene where Melanie is pausing outside a door to a room, deciding to see whether the birds are inside, that has some genuinely good tension (though why would you go in that room? You can HEAR the birds, you know they're in there). Then someone comes up with the brilliant idea to go outside and see if there's any news on the car radio (I would veto that idea, since I don't want to die, but the characters in this movie seem to court death for some reason). All in all, this movie would probably be better with some more likeable characters, and if the characters didn't do stupid things like bringing their pet birds along on a road trip when all the birds in the world have started to go crazy) and if it had an actual ending and didn't just stop almost in midsentence and call that an ending. I would love to see this movie remade to see what they could do with this idea today, but this movie just falls flat for me.
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