Dead Birds (2004) - Movie Review

What do you get when you take a Western Heist movie and mix in a little bit of Lovecraftian horror?

An extremely uneven, but entertaining movie.

Let’s discuss.

DeadBirds is a 2004 horror/western brought to us by director Alex Turner and writer Simon Barrett. While Turner remains a relatively unknown director, Simon Barrett has been fairly prolific in the genre having written segments of V/H/S, V/H/S/2, V/H/S/94, and 2016’s Blair Witch remake. Either way, neither of them brought their A-game to this film.

The film focuses on a group of former confederate soldiers who commit a bloody bank robbery and decide to hide out at a remote plantation that’s been abandoned for years. It seems like the perfect hiding spot, that is until the sun goes down. Once darkness falls, strange things start happening. A massive downpour arrives out of nowhere and with it comes strange creatures and violent apparitions. Each member of the party is forced to face their demons alongside the horrors that occupy the property. Will they last till dawn to enjoy the spoils of their illicit gains or will they find their bodies alongside all of the Dead Birds.

It was a hard movie to summarize, because the narrative and direction is shotgunned in all directions. The filmmakers obviously had an idea of what they thought they were doing, but had no conception of how to execute the story.

Often, a story begins gestation as either an idea for a beginning, climax, or ending. The trick is connecting up the story to ensure whatever the showcase moment you began with has a satisfying connection to the overall narrative. In this basic principle, the filmmakers completely failed.

While I enjoyed the movie, I can’t recommend it.

The film has an outstanding cast with the likes of Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit, and one of the finest actors working today—Michael Shannon. You’ve even got stalwart genre vets like Isiah Washington, Mark Boone Junior, and the gone too soon Nicki Aycox. However, no amount of good casting can fix a terribly written script and unbelievably loose direction.

A single location horror, or haunted house style film requires tension. Often times in the great films of old like the original House on Haunted Hill or the George C. Scott starrer The Changeling, this requires tight direction. Good horror directors know how to garrote the strings around the audience’s mind to impose the pressure of the terror that might be around every corner.

This film blows its load in the first 20 minutes.

As soon as the party reaches the hideout, a lovecraftian monster runs out of the corn and attacks them. They kill it and then casually shrug off the fact that it looks like a 5 foot tall hairless mole rat that doesn’t look anything like something in nature, and just step over it.

This makes absolutely no sense and immediately crushes any tension building as from the get go, you know exactly what’s coming for them—and the special effects that made it were terribly lacking.

There’s really bad cgi used to mask the eyes of the rubber suited actor, and it ruins any suspension of disbelief you could have seeing the creature.

We’re talking cgi that looks straight out of iMovie.

They randomly shoehorn in a ghost of a cowboy / slave owner / necromancer and out of nowhere give Isiah Washington’s character psychic powers, but it’s all ham-fisted with no establishing story or events.

They spend almost ten minutes on the beginnings of a sex scene between Aycox and Thomas that really was unnecessary and could have been devoted to maybe fleshing out Washington’s character or providing more time for the mustache twirling antics of Michael Shannon’s Clyde.

The music is also a miss, which is almost a bigger mistake than the CGI. Music is a character of its own in the haunted house / cosmic horror films of old. This has a public domain sounding, cheap tinny soundtrack.

I wish they’d just stuck to one idea for the story. Whether that was a vengeful ghost or cosmic horror, but instead we get a film that just feels like an incomplete student film.

Don’t get me wrong…This is a fun movie to watch with friends and laugh at. It has a couple decent jump scares, but overall it’s just not as good as the hype would lead you to believe.

This is not a cult classic.

If you want to check this one out, it’s currently streaming free on Amazon Prime.