2 out of 5

Directed by: René Cardona Jr.

There are low budget red flags aplenty here, with a decades-too-late plot knockoff – “Beaks” being a more manically escalating take on Hitchcock’s The Birds (and having occasionally been titled as Beaks: The Birds 2) – a bit of pointless cheesecake fluff thrown in, and casual animal abuse. The former is kind of hilarious, with Beaks almost a precursor to Birdemic levels of nonsense; the cheesecake truly is fluff – a harmless shot of a bikini-ed lady running in slo-mo and similar, but appreciably spare, “lookit dat flesh” type shots; but the latter is, as always, tough to ignore. Because writer / director René Cardona Jr. swapped out gulls, sparrows and crows for pigeons, I accept that many who feel that pigeons are rats with wings may not care, but setting aside my love for pigeons – we shouldn’t be harming animals for the sake of a shot, and especially the many, many repeated shots in Beaks of birds flying through (i.e. thrown through) windows, and generally carelessly treated.

Okay. That warning up front, Beaks is not a bad low budget animal disaster movie, as it arguably tries to be a movie, while happily dawdling in the excess gore and aforementioned cheesecake flourishes required of its genre. The plot is still nonsense of course, going ecological with its messaging – yes, irony that a movie warning about man’s impact on the planet is happy to treat its feathered stars with zero care – and latching us to leads Michelle Johnson and Christopher Atkins via having them be reporters, bouncing around Spain and documenting the recent trend of birds ripping out people’s eyeballs, but there’s an attempt to do some vague world-building with the side characters, and to ratchet up the tension of The Birds significantly by having the attacks go from zero to all-out pretty quickly, which fails at doing anything but be silly (anyone who’s lived in a pigeon-heavy city will laugh at these things ever seeming threatening), but, again, at least has the essence of a creator trying to craft something to earn an audience and cash-in, as opposed to just doing the second part. There are some decent framings of shots, and a nice variation in settings and going from one harried attack sequence to the next, getting us on the water, in the air, in cars, in a train; Stelvio Cipriani’s tempered score plays well against the overwrought acting and occasional grand guignol visuals; while Johnson’s and Atkins’ line reads often seem like the exact tone of the movie was unclear to them, they’re not zoned out performances.

At over the 90 minute mark, though, Beaks stretches its super limited ideas, only getting worth it for the admitted laughs when the pigeon threat starts to include… ducks, I guess? and we can’t be bothered with clearing all of the super scary birds from every set, so when folks are celebrating their safety, there will still be some pigeons roosting in the corner. Prior to that point, it’s passable knockoff fare.

Note: I watched the Rifftrax version of this for review. Sometimes that’s how it goes.