Banana A Day – The Birds

This is a romance film that turns into a creature feature then it ends very ambiguously. Melanie Daniels is a rich young woman who has a bizarre sense of humour. When she is visiting a pet store she pretends to by an employee so that she can have a conversation with handsome lawyer Mitch Brenner. The joke ends up being on Melanie as Mitch knows who she is and plays along with Melanie's ruse. Intrigued by this encounter Melanie heads to Mitch's house in Bodega Bay in order to pull one over on him. While boating on the bay Melanie gets dive-bombed by a seagull. Things only get worse from there. The best things about The Birds is how deliberately paced it is. There will be a bird attack and then nothing will happen for a while. Out of the blue another attack will happen that is worse than before. In between the attacks the love story between Melanie and Mitch plays out. This continues until the third act of the film when the love story goes into the background and the crazy bird attacks become the main focus. There are some impressive scenes involving children getting pecked at, cars exploding, and buildings on fire. One great scene in between the chaos takes place in a diner. Discussion goes on about what could be causing The Birds to attack and there are those in the diner who don't believe that the bird apocalypse has arrived. This long scene reminded me a lot of Frank Darabont's The Mist and I wouldn't be surprised is this scene was an inspiration for how the characters in The Mist interact with each other in the supermarket. The Birds ends without an explanation to why all the birds at Bodega Bay have gone insane. I like that it doesn't try to explain it. The movie doesn't come up with a solution to the killer bird problem which is much scarier than having a quick fix at the end of the movie. The Birds is a bit slow at the beginning, but the last half of the film is very fun. Before I saw this film I thought I could take on a bird if it attacked me, now I am not so sure.