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xSamhainx
Paws of Doom
Joined: 11 Sep 2002
Posts: 2192
Location: San Diego |
Dead Birds
Set during the Civil War, this tale of a damned house and it's doomed guests aims to empty an old rusty Remington model #1858 Confederate Army issue revolver into you. Unfortunately, a few of those shots misfire, and what could have been a really good movie is just an ok haunted house flick. It sounds great, a Civil War era horror film, yet I found myself sitting through this movie hoping that it was going to get better in ten minutes. Don't be fooled, "Gods and Generals" meets "Evil Dead" this aint. The historical context of the film is limited to a few Confederate uniforms and a brief flashback to a stay in a field hospital cot, and the demons arent anything to get too worked up about.
Opening with a pleasantly brutal bank robbery scene, bullets, blades, and blood fly as a small band of Confederate deserters kill everyone inside a small-town bank. After cutting a swath through the law and common townsfolk on their way out of dodge, they make their way through the woods to an old southern style mansion and plantation seemingly abandoned long ago. As you can probably guess, the mansion is hardly abandoned, and it's current residents welcome the weary criminals with open claws, and much spook house mayhem follows.
The southern mansion in which they take refuge is a perfect setting, and its creepy faded sepia toned family photographs still on the mantles and yellowed, molded walls give the place a nice ominous feel. You can practically smell the musty old place as they move from darkened room to room, searching for any signs of life. This is American Gothic come to unlife, with it's old steel frames and rusty farm implements, paint peeling off the weatherbeaten structures, long forgotten cornfields, and wells long gone dry. It's rain on the scarecrow and blood on the plow all the way, and they do a fairly good job setting the atmosphere as such, I'll give em that.
Then the demonic/ghostly hijinks begin, as one of the badly wounded bandits (Sam) encounters a couple restless spirits while he's napping upstairs. Mercifully, the entire mess is pretty much explained in detail by the particularly grouchy ghost of the former master of the estate. Apparently his wife fell deathly ill, and in an effort to save her, he busted out a copy of what looks like Ash's copy of the Necronomicon, and started sacrificing his slave staff. But as usually happens when making deals with the ne'er do wells of the netherworld, the demons pull a fast one on him, and his beloved wife and kids are transformed into hideous demons. He kills his demonic kids and tosses them in the well, and is in turn lynched by the townsfolk as a murderer, hung up as a scarecrow to die in his own cornfield. His wife was left alive, and is the first demon they encounter. So at least the movie is fairly clear about what's going on.
What starts to hurt the movie fairly early is the fact I've seen all these characters endless times in different movies. If you've seen one motley crew of cookie-cutter outlaws, you've seen them all.
- A hot bandit chick for the lead guy? CHECK!
- A token indian or black tag-along, loyal to the lead guy? CHECK!
- A racist bandit who dislikes the token indian or black tag-along? CHECK!
- A fat disposable character who might as well be wearing a red shirt? CHECK!
- Plotting and scheming amongst themselves to take the money and run? CHECK!
- One seriously injured bandit? CHECK!
- The intelligence of a school of fish? CHECK!
I just felt that these clowns had all the depth and charisma of an episode of "Walker:Texas Ranger". The only bit of backstory we get from any of these people is the lead bandit's (William) brief dream flashback of his stay in a military field hospital, where he met his official bandit chick (Annabelle) who was a nurse there. This is the only instance in which the horrors of the Civil War are used. Instead of traumatic memories of men being ripped apart by cannonballs, or the evil spirits of the house capitalizing on the shellshocked minds of the deserters, we get a short visit to a cot. In an eye-rolling pillowtalk confession, William apparently feels bad because a child was killed in the crossfire back at the bank shootout. After watching these miscreants stab and blow away an entire bank full of people and it's guards, this is quite laughable. Especially if you watch the bonus material, there's a deleted scene from the robbery in which they all in unison aim their pistols and mercilessly blow away a pleading old man with glee!
There are some problems with the monster effects in the film. For one, the puppets used for the demons look kinda fake, and watching them in motion looks like a animatronic type thing you see in Chuck E Cheese or something. They'd have been far better used in brief flashes, especially since theyre mostly used in strange sped-up dreamlike explanatory sequences anyway. There is a laughable looking mask used on a little girl ghost at one point that made me wonder why they even bothered, and just werent consistent about using the Chuck E Cheese monsters instead of going from bad to worse. This is one film I think that would have benefited from a bit more CGI, because at least that is done well enough when it's used. However, the gore effects are done quite well, the initial shootout at the bank is cool, and a skinned sacrificial person looked damn good. There is also some editing gaffes, one in particular during one of the aforementioned explanatory montages made me think there was a Dorito fingerprint or something on the disc, because it seems to just freeze for a few seconds.
The encounters are a bit predictible, with characters waking to find a little girl curled up in a corner with her face hidden, etc. Hmm, wonder what's going to happen when she turns around? It's a pretty basic haunted house film that doesn't bring anything new to the table, but I wouldn't say the movie doesn't have any merit, just very little for the veteran horror flick watcher who is looking for a little something more. The historical setting could have been used a whole lot better, and the scares and characters could have spent a bit more time in the oven in my opinion. Even the title seems half-baked, one of the characters steps on a dead bird on the way into the house, which the camera focuses on as if it means something. Maybe its some kind of allegory, that they themselves truly are the "dead birds". Who cares anyway, I sure as hell don't by this point.
This is a straight to video popcorn movie to rent for the sake of curiosity, or the lack of anything better on the shelf.
_________________
“Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.”-Mark Twain |
Sat Aug 06, 2005 9:36 pm |
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