The pinnacle of underachievement from the most overrated director of all time.

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 1999)

The fifty-fourth film of Hitchcock's 59-strong career as a director (out of which only 20 or so are really well-known), I will commit film heresy by lumping this one together with `The Big Sleep' and `The Exorcist' as examples of films that are vastly overlauded by the movie critic industry. Psycho is a worthwhile piece of work, and IS well-shot, though others  such as the middle-brow, clumsy exposition of North By Northwest  are vaguely above average and surely not worthy of such high praise?
Reappraisal for weak films happens all the time and I feel certain that this should happen in reverse. The Birds may have worked in 1963, when its overlaid pictures of flying birds and feeble puppetry looked convincing. But without such sophistication in a 90s context, the attention is instead drawn to the script and acting, and that is where it clearly falls down. Okay, maybe I come from the Robert DeNiro method school and would have liked the birds in question to have had some motivation, rather than `let's just peck people for the hell of it'. But even extracting that argument away from this film, it still falls on many levels. The dialogue is a stilted, stylised set, with deliberately encouraged underplaying by the cast, Jessica Tandy particularly. This would be fine in another film, but in one as bizarre as this it means we are left with no sense of reality.
There are the silly bits, of course, such as the two (laughably fake) budgerigars that sit on the car floor and bend in time with the bends in the road. Okay, I will refrain from making pathetic puns about this film `giving me the bird' and the bird in question being a turkey. All I will say is that this film would not be accepted from any other director. It is a cheap, low-brow exploitation picture that takes its audience for granted and shows them no respect in return. From any other director this one would be regarded as pulp horror of the cheep, sorry, cheapest variety. But at date of writing this one is ranked 222 in the IMDb top 250.