If Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was a delicately balanced martini of suspense, dread, and icy blonde terror, then René Cardona Jr.’s Beaks: The Movie is a warm can of Schlitz with a cigarette butt floating in it. Somewhere between Mexican tax shelter and unintentional comedy, this 1987 disaster flick proves once and for all that when it comes to killer animals, it’s not nature that should scare you—it’s the filmmakers.
Opening Shots: Fowl Play
The film begins not with menace, but with poultry slapstick: a farmer is pecked to death by his own chickens. Yes, chickens. The cinematic equivalent of being mugged by a toddler. Enter Vanessa (Michelle Johnson), a television reporter so glamorous she makes network anchors look like DMV clerks. Johnson is the only good reason to watch this mess; she delivers lines about ecological imbalance while looking like she just stepped out of a shampoo commercial. She’s supposed to be horrified by carnivorous pigeons, but she spends most of the running time looking like she’s posing for Cosmopolitan. And thank God for that. Without her cheekbones and dubious cleavage shots, this movie would collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.
Her cameraman and boyfriend Peter (Christopher Atkins) tags along, bringing with him the charisma of a cardboard cutout and the acting range of an ATM machine. Together they form journalism’s least convincing duo, running toward danger with the urgency of people late for a brunch reservation.
Michelle Johnson is Sexy, The Birds are Not
Let’s pause and appreciate Michelle Johnson. This is a woman who once turned up in Blame It on Rio and made Michael Caine reconsider the boundaries of decency. In Beaks, she’s draped in silk blouses, tight skirts, and a constant aura of “I can’t believe I’m cashing this paycheck.” She’s sexy in that 1980s, feathered-hair, lip-gloss way that makes you forgive a thousand bad script decisions. If the birds had any taste, they would’ve stopped attacking peasants and gone straight for her hotel balcony.
But alas, Cardona Jr. isn’t Hitchcock. His idea of suspense is cutting to a parrot flapping its wings while Stelvio Cipriani’s score blares like rejected disco tracks. The “horror” is so inept that every scene turns into accidental camp. You start rooting for the birds, not because you hate humanity, but because at least they’re trying.
Plot? Or Poultrygeist?
Vanessa and Peter jet off to Spain after discovering that a whole town was wiped out by angry birds thirty years earlier. Conveniently, survivors are still hanging around, eager to deliver grim monologues about “the day the sky turned black.” Meanwhile, the birds conduct guerilla warfare: a child’s birthday party becomes an avian bloodbath, a farmer and his wife get reduced to birdseed, and a train becomes a rolling buffet of screaming extras.
The logic is astounding. These birds are not just attacking—they’re strategizing. They peck, they claw, they dive-bomb like kamikazes with feathers. Vanessa solemnly concludes the birds are organizing themselves against “the ecological ravages of man.” Translation: pigeons are pissed about pollution. If Greenpeace could weaponize this film, they’d never need another donation.
The Train Wreck (Literally)
The film’s grand finale is a train sequence that feels like it was storyboarded on cocktail napkins. Vanessa is aboard, birds swarm, passengers scream, and extras flail about as if auditioning for a detergent commercial. The editing is so choppy that you wonder if Jesús Paredes had a nervous breakdown in the cutting room. Birds fly in from every direction, sometimes clearly tossed by off-screen crew members with no shame. At one point, a gull ricochets off a man’s face like a drunken Frisbee. This is cinema at its most tragicomic.
Cardona Jr.: Hitchcock with a Hangover
René Cardona Jr., the auteur of this poultry apocalypse, was responsible for Tintorera: Killer Shark and Night of a Thousand Cats—two titles that prove truth is stranger (and dumber) than fiction. With Beaks, he attempts a Hitchcock homage but ends up with a parody too long for Saturday Night Live. Cardona directs like a man who’s just discovered zoom lenses and isn’t afraid to abuse them. Close-up of a terrified face. Zoom out. Cut to stock footage of birds circling. Repeat until nausea sets in.
The cinematography by Leopoldo Villaseñor is competent in the way a DMV photo is competent. Things are in frame, vaguely lit, and occasionally visible. The real MVP is Stelvio Cipriani, whose score veers wildly between faux-symphonic grandeur and synth nightmares better suited to an aerobics video. Imagine trying to be scared while the soundtrack insists you should be stretching to “Sweatin’ to the Oldies.”
The Humor of Horror
What makes Beaks perversely entertaining is its utter sincerity. The cast is playing it straight, as though killer pigeons are as terrifying as nuclear war. Nobody winks at the camera. Nobody acknowledges the absurdity. That dead-serious approach transforms every attack into comedy gold. Watching an old man fend off budgies with a broom is funnier than anything Mel Brooks directed in the ‘80s.
Michelle Johnson’s Vanessa delivers ecological sermons like she’s lecturing on PBS, while standing in a blouse cut down to her navel. Christopher Atkins reacts to carnage with the emotional range of a potato. Extras collapse, birds flutter, and you, the viewer, wonder how you ended up cheering for the pigeons.
Why It Exists
So why does Beaks exist? Easy: money. Cardona Jr. saw the enduring success of Hitchcock’s The Birds and thought, “What if I remake it but with less talent, fewer resources, and more doves?” The result is an exploitation flick marketed in Europe as Beaks: The Birds 2. Audiences expecting Hitchcock’s menace got turkeys instead.
And yet, in its cheapness, there’s a twisted charm. Like an Ed Wood fever dream, Beaks refuses to die. It shows up on VHS bargain bins, late-night cable, and now streaming platforms desperate for content. Watching it is like finding a dead raccoon in your garage: grotesque, hilarious, and impossible to look away from.
Final Verdict
Beaks: The Movie is cinematic compost. It’s laughable, it’s terrible, it’s barely coherent—but it’s never boring. Michelle Johnson provides enough sex appeal to keep your eyes on the screen, while the birds provide enough accidental slapstick to keep you laughing through the pain. The only real victims here are the audience members who thought they were buying a horror film instead of a comedy.
In the pantheon of killer-animal movies, Beaks belongs in the chicken coop out back, right next to Frogs and Grizzly II: Revenge. But give it this: no film has ever made pigeons look more determined to unionize.
