Seriously... not enough praise for this gem!!

Rating: 10/10 (15 December 2011)

It's easily a TOP 3 Hitchcock film for me! PSYCHO is easily my favorite. With NORTH BY NORTHWEST and THE BIRDS duking it out for 2nd place. Everyone raves about VERTIGO (way overrated) and REAR WINDOW (good but not great) but it's THE BIRDS which is easily the most underrated film of the Master of Suspense! Forget VERTIGO. THE BIRDS is a true masterpiece! What's really amazing about the film is that we're never told why the birds attack. They just do. And they do it in stages. No one knows why. Is it Tippi Hedren's arrival in Bodega Bay? Is it just some strange coincidence? Is it Mother Nature? Nothing is more terrifying than that which we do not understand. This film really delivers! Who can forget that scene where Tippi sits smoking on a bench as the birds slowly gather on the jungle-gym behind her? When she finally looks back she's terrified to see the jungle-gym completely covered in a black cloud of birds!!
But just think about the sheer guts that Hitch must have had to undertake such a daunting task as this film! I mean how do you film a movie with a swarm of killer birds pecking folks to death? And all without CGI! Using live birds!! Sheesh... if I were a director I would have said "no thanks" without even giving it a second thought. How do you do a movie where the villain is a bird? Not one bird. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them.
Sure you have a good deal of rear-projection shots. But you also have shots of real birds tied to the actual kids who are running for their lives. Each shot has to be carefully scrutinized. You have a combination of real birds & fake birds, rear-projection, various camera tricks and cuts, an exhausted Tippi Hedren who wound up in the hospital from all this, etc. The whole undertaking really does make your jaw drop! And it's not just merely a novelty item (just some ground-breaking special effects movie) it really has that genuine terror and suspense that Hitch's best films possess. Only PSYCHO is superior to this one in terms of terror/suspense!
It's not something like AVATAR where it's all just a commercial to show off the latest in Hollywood SFX. It's a genuine horror film!!