Many of Stephen King's so-called "trademarks" . . .

Rating: 8/10 (4 September 2013)

. . . can be found right here in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 opus, THE BIRDS. In fact, if you put THE BIRDS side-by-side with ALL of the movies based on King's writings to date, it's hard to believe that there is another classic out there that has so many hallmarks of what today is known as the Stephen King story style. Essentially, THE BIRDS invented Stephen King. Nature run amok. Can you say Cujo? The holy roller tourist mother in the diner going berserk, and blaming visitor Melanie for the rampaging gulls (a delicious irony on Hitchcock's part, since the traveling mom is an outsider herself! The sanctimonious people come up as weak links again and again in King-based works). The Rube Goldberg machine-type scenario leading to one kind of disaster morphing into an even worse apocalyptic horse of a different color, with the exploding gas station and cars. Haven't we seen the exact same thing happen in countless King tales? The quirky egghead (an ornithologist spinster here) and the drunken "doomsayer"--both in the crab shack scenes--get kidnapped to the East Coast in nearly every King screenplay. If you want to see the earliest Stephen King movie, watch THE BIRDS.