It’s always frustrating when a new film completely overshadows an original, to the extent that people no longer know that it exists.
I am, of course, not speaking of Angry Birds 2, which has made headlines for getting the highest Rotten Tomatoes score of any video game movie ever made (so far), and which has apparently outshined the (surprisingly successful) original Angry Birds film.
Instead, I refer to Alan Smithee’s The Birds II: Land’s End, which was – if nothing else – the original Angry Birds 2, and a film which most people don’t seem to remember ever existed.
Yes, Virginia, there was a sequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and yes, Virginia, there’s a very good reason why we don’t talk about it very much.
The original horror classic The Birds came out in 1963 and starred Tippi Hedren, in her motion picture debut, as Melanie Daniels, a celebutante who follows an attractive lawyer to his hometown of Bodega Bay with the intent of wooing him. But what could have been a romantic weekend turns unexpectedly and inexplicably deadly, after all the birds in town start attacking every human being in sight.
The Birds featured remarkable visual effects for the era and, in a very experimental move for a mainstream Hollywood picture, it had no score whatsoever (although Bernard Herrmann, who composed the scores for many of Hitchcock’s most famous films, including Psycho, consulted on the sound design). Another of the movie’s many subversions of the Hollywood norm was the ending, in which the birds are not stopped, the reason for their deadly rampage is never given, and the screen doesn’t even give the audience the finality of a “The End” credit. The horror apparently just continues, forever and ever. It’s chilling.
And, of course, it left plenty of room for a follow-up. It just happened to take 31 years to get made. In 1994, The Birds II: Land’s End premiered on Showtime to overwhelmingly negative reviews, and watching it today it’s easy to see why.
It’s really, really, really… not good.
The Birds II stars Brad Johnson (Flight of the Intruder) and Chelsea Field (Death Spa) as Ted and Mary Hocken, a married couple recovering from the death of their son in a car accident. They have two young daughters, a dog who steals whole turkeys off the table, and a completely inert sex life. They have rented a house in the fishing community of Gull Island so he can finish writing his biology thesis. To help make the ends meet over the summer, Mary takes a job training a famous photographer, Frank (James Naughton, Cat’s Eye), how to do complex computing tasks like not moving his mouse too fast. There’s a scene in which learning that takes him a really long time. It’s not the movie’s highlight.
Meanwhile, birds start doing all kinds of evil bird stuff like pecking out the eyes of innocent bystanders and waging war on kids’ bedrooms. Unlike the original movie, which took place over just a few days, The Birds II: Land’s End takes place over an entire summer, which has several effects on the storyline. For one thing, it makes the whole film less suspenseful because it literally takes weeks for the tension to ramp up. For another, it gives the characters a lot more time to idly postulate about what’s really going on, and for the town’s know-nothing mayor to argue that he doesn’t care if the birds really are attacking or if the sea really is polluted; all he cares about is keeping the island’s fishing industry afloat.
So after about half a film of a boring couple not having sex and being unsure of themselves, The Birds II finally settles into a half-hearted Jaws riff. At least the film’s third act, when the birds start really outdoing themselves, features some fine feathered carnage. The birds attack a lighthouse at night, which leads to genuinely dramatic images, and eventually, they dive-bomb the entire community as the citizens try to flee to the mainland. The bit where a guy shoots a flare at a bird, which then plummets on fire into a gas spill in the ocean, which then blows up every damned thing in sight, is charmingly goofy.
The Birds II is neither horrifying nor suspenseful nor even “so bad it’s good.” It’s just pretty bad. The film was directed by Rick Rosenthal, the director of the original Halloween 2, and he had his name taken off the project and replaced with “Alan Smithee” (formerly the go-to fake name for directors who didn’t want to be associated with a project anymore). And that’s really saying something. After all, Rosenthal KEPT his name on Halloween: Resurrection.
But even stranger is the fact that The Birds II: Land’s End features a supporting performance by Tippi Hedren herself, as the proprietor of a local convenience store. Her character, Helen, is obviously not the same person she played in the original film, but The Birds II does treat her appearance like a meta-joke since she’s one of the only people on the island who takes the bird strikes seriously, as though she knows something everyone else doesn’t. (Hedren would later say, reportedly, that the film “embarrasses me horribly.”)
If you actually want to see this thing, good luck. The Birds II: Land’s End doesn’t seem to be much of a priority in the home video world. It’s not readily available for streaming and Region 1 DVDs aren’t really a thing, although VHS copies were produced and they aren’t exactly in high demand, so they can be found online relatively easily. There was a time when The Birds II was released to some fanfare, if only for its novelty value, but now that it’s hardly ever re-run on cable and all but buried in every other distribution format, you’d be forgiven for having no idea this damned movie even existed at all.
But it does exist, and if nothing else can be said about it (which is probably true), it does have some very, very angry birds… too.