The horror genre is always looking for new animals to exploit.
After all, spiders, killer dogs, rage-infested monkeys and killer microbes can
only go so far. Reaching back to the rich legacy of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, director Sheldon Wilson’s Kaw offers up an elemental slice of
man versus nature, in the form of a gruesome battle for survival against a
flock of vicious ravens.
The Company’s Kristin Booth, above), to
begin their new life. What begins as a quiet day in
isolated rural hometown quickly turns into a dark day of terror and death, however.
Phone calls roll in about marauding ravens, first from town drunk and military
veteran Clyde (Stephen McHattie, of A
History of Violence, and the small screen’s Guiding Light).
is understandably skeptical, but do you know what changes his mind? Reasoned
reflection and/or the impassioned pleas of his wife-to-be? No — attacks by
thousands of blood-thirsty ravens who also possess a high level of
intelligence.
When the local girls’ soccer team comes under siege by the
killer birds, who dive bomb their bus with large rocks, everyone desperately
fights their way towards the town diner. There Wayne, town doctor Doc (Rod Taylor)
and a few other remaining townspeople make a stand, fighting the birds off
before they kill off the entire community. Along the way, a schism between the most
of the town and a Mennonite sect nominally headed up by farmers Jacob (Vladimir
Bondarenko) and Oskar (John Ralston) sheds some light (or does it?) on the explanation
for the attacks, if not the disturbing lack of poop runs.
His involvement in the execrable The Boondock Saints
notwithstanding, Flanery is a serviceable enough actor, albeit a sort of budget
Christian Slater. He has a believable world-weary quality that serves him well,
especially in genre fare like this. Director Wilson (Shallow Ground), meanwhile, keeps things moving at a decent pace, and
Kaw’s CGI effects are decent, at
least until the requirements of bigger-better-more start to weigh down the movie’s
plausibility (I know, I know…) even further than the story inherently might. From the second act on, things
trend predictably gory and goosing more so than menacing, but genre fans
looking for a movie about killer birds will be more or less sated with this
entry, even it doesn’t quite match the dusty avian siege sequence in Resident Evil: Extinction.
Kaw comes housed in
a regular plastic Amray case, and is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen,
to preserve the aspect ratio of the movie’s theatrical exhibition… if there had
been one. Its audio, with English and French language tracks, comes in a
decently mixed Dolby digital 5.1, getting some value out of its high-end
register. French and English subtitles are also available. Since he appeared opposite
Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s The Birds,
Taylor makes for a nice bit of referential casting, if one cares about the matter;
it’s for this reason that he sits for a special 22-minute interview here,
discussing his memories of both movies, and comparing and contrasting them. It’s
a nice chat, also covering other elements of his career. There’s also a 24-minute
making-of featurette, with lots of time appropriately devoted to the bird
wrangling and effects work. While there is referential (and reverential) mention
made of Hitchcock and The Birds, it’s
also clear that some of the attacks were very similarly storyboarded; more
transparency about this would have been appreciated, without greatly
distracting from Kaw’s nominal
merits. C (Movie) B- (Disc)