The birds are pissed off. A hang glider gets pecked to death while flying through the sky. A chicken farmer is devoured. A professional hunter loses an eye to a bird and then has to use the remaining one to watch as the birds savagely attack his granddaughter’s birthday party. A family on vacation is forced to run for cover as their attacked by pigeons and doves. From South America to Spain to Puerto Rico, the birds are organizing and they are attacking. Can journalist Vanessa (Michelle Johnson) and her cameraman Peter (Christopher Atkins) figure out why the birds are attacking or are they destined to become the latest victims of the avian terror?
This may sound like the Hitchcock film but Beaks was directed by Mexico’s Rene Cardona, Jr. and that makes all the difference. Following in the footsteps of his father, Cardona was the king of Mexican B-movies. There was no idea strange enough or plot stupid enough that Rene Cardona, Jr. couldn’t take it and turn it into a really bad movie. Even by his standards, Beaks is bad as pigeons and doves are tossed at screaming actors. Why are the birds attacking? Caronda shows us a polluted lake as if to say, “Any questions?” In the end, the birds attack until they suddenly don’t anymore but don’t get too cocky because there are other animals out there that are looking mighty disgruntled.
For some reason, in the late 80s and early 90s, Christopher Atkins had a very busy career in bad movies. Seeing the Atkins name in the cast was usually a good sign that it was time to change the channel. In Beaks, he gets the best line when he says, “These birds know what they’re doing!” The film’s second best line goes to another actor, Gabriele Tinti, who says, “Fucking bird, flapping everywhere.”
If Hitchcock made The Birds with less skill but more gore and gratuitous nudity, the end result would still be better than Beaks.
When I was growing up in Baltimore, I used to go down to this independent video story every weekend and check out movies. Every time that I stepped into the store, the first thing I saw was the poster for Blame It On Rio hanging over the front register. The store did not actually have any copies of Blame It On Rio in stock and I don’t think anyone working there had ever seen it but it only takes one look at the poster to guess what they were thinking when they hung it at the front of the store.
