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The Birds

The Birds

List Price: $19.98
Your Price: $14.99
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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Hitchcock masterpiece!
Review: This is definitely one of Hitchcock's greatest creations. A fantastic film starring the beautiful Tippi Hedren, handsome Rod Taylor and respected actress Jessica Tandy. The film also features Suzanne Pleshette and a young Veronica Cartwright (Alien, The Witches of Eastwick). This isn't one of those silly horror flicks with tons of bloodshed and endless deaths. It's a very tasteful and effective thriller. Buy this one right away!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The Birds is Coming!
Review: Of all of Alfred Hitchcock's films, The Birds is remarkable on a number of levels. Technically, for the time, it was a marvel. Needing years of preparation with hundreds of trick shots, it still is pretty powerful stuff, even by today's computer generated standards. Heroine Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) follows handsome bachelor Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) to Bodega Bay, California, with a gift of Love Birds for his younger sister. When Melanie is attacked by a seagull right in front of Mitch, a series of unusual events begin to take place. Before you know it, thousands of birds are attacking the inhabitants of Bodega Bay with a vengeance no one can explain. Even though The Birds is not your typical Hitchcock suspense, it still has many of his classic elements: the possessive mother (Jessica Tandy), the cast-off old girlfriend (Suzanne Pleshette), and the glamourous, cool blond (Hedren), with mother problems of her own. The camera work throughout this film is extraordinary. The shot of Taylor driving his car along the Bodega Bay coast to meet Hedren at the dock is a wonderful piece of cinematography. My favorite scene is at the the restaurant where the patrons desperately try to get the attention of a man lighting a match near a flowing river of gasoline. It's a great scene and it's classic Hitchcock suspense. Good performances from all the lead players, with an amazing debut by Hedren. It's a shame her next big feature, Marnie was a financial and critical failure because she was a very interesting screen personality. All in all, The Birds is a fun film, one I never tire of watching.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Great DVD
Review: Here's a great Hitchcock thriller on DVD, full of great extras. "All About the Birds" is a documentary about how the movie was made. Watching that makes the movie just that much better, because it illustrates the true genius of Hitchcock's moviemaking. I would highly recommend this DVD to any fan of Hitchcock.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: ONE OF MY FAVORITES
Review: THIS IS ONR OF MY FAVORITES OF HITCHCOCK.IT HAS GREAT SUSPENCE. TIPPI HEDREN IS BEAUTIFUL.THE STORY IS GREAT.IT HAS DASHES OF HUMOR AND JOKES.THIS IS ALL PACKED INTO ONE OF HITCHCOCKS BEST FILMS.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Still an incredible achievement - Hitch at his best
Review: If only more DVD's were this good! Granted you may well get countless extras with more uptodate films (ala GLADIATOR, FIGHT CLUB, MEN IN BLACK etc), but films such as THE BIRDS often get overlooked in the extras department. Not in this case though.

As one reviewer here so rightly stated, the extras here are quite staggering, particularly that documentary, which is the best I've seen on any film, ever. You genuinely do learn more about the making of every aspect of the film than you could possibly have hoped for, especially in how Hitchcock brought his vision to the screen (the part where you learn that Hitch enjoyed the pre-production of the film more than the actual shooting, was for example something I didn't know).

As for the film itself, well it still stands the test of time as one of the most perfect examples of visual film making that you'll ever see. Hitchcock's always treated the viewer with respect, allowing countless scenes of little or no dialolgue to tell the story. It's a shame that more directors nowadays haven't the skill or guts to actually let the image tell the story. True, some may have tried, such as the interesting but hugely flawed THE CELL, but it does seem that film makers like Hitchcock are a very rare species indeed.

Huge plaudits go to the effects people too, particularly the genius of Albert Whitlock's matte paintings (that aerial bird's P.O.V. shot over the town of Bodaga Bay after the explosion at the petrol station is still a jaw-dropping moment), and it's a crime that their work failed to bring them an oscar.

The closest anyone has got to successfully matching or replicating Hitchcock's suspenseful style would be in Robert Zemeckis's jumpy and atmospheric WHAT LIES BENEATH, but at the end of the day there is and always will be only one true master of terror and suspense - Alfred Hitchcock himself.

A must have!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A good idea made into a great movie
Review: As long as I can remember, I've always heard people brag about how good of a movie "The Birds" was. I finally got to see it on television and I agree with everything I had ever heard about it. It is a great, classic horror movie. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) is on a short trip from San Francisco to Bodega Bay, California in order to deliver a couple of lovebirds to Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), for his younger sister's birthday. All the while, Melanie, Rod, and the others are noticing some strange behavior in some local birds, especially the seagulls and the crows. Once a huge number of birds flock into Mitch's house, and then later attack a school, Melanie and the rest of the people must do something to protect themselves from the birds.

If you like great horror movies, I definitely recommend getting "The Birds." Don't think that just because it was made in 1963 that it's not a good horror movie, because it is, it's a classic from Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock definitely did a good job directing the movie, and everybody in the movie did a good job of acting. All the horror scenes, especially the one where the birds are almost pecking through the wooden door and the major attack on Melanie at the end of the movie are well done.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Birds is a true masterpiece
Review: The Birds is a wonderful movie with a lot of suspense. The DVD itself is very good, the documentary is very instructive and well made. Don't listen idiot people who complain about the extras of the DVD, watch the movie and the documentary instead.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Interesting but deeply overrated film
Review: I've always felt kind of ambivalent about The Birds. Yeah, it's Hitchcock, and you get lots of cool Hitchcockian touches (the lack of a musical score makes the film much scarier than it otherwise would have been), but am I the only person who thinks there's way, way too much exposition and character development? Every time I see it I find myself losing interest in the overdeveloped story until the brilliant restaurant scene, where everything is suddenly funny and entertaining and offbeat. And that part when Tippi Hedren sllloooowwwwlllyyy walks up the stairs to investigate a suspicious noise and opens the bedroom door to find thousands of little feathered menaces... it's brilliant. But you have to sit through so much gray, uninteresting, irrelevant character interaction to get to that point that the payoff almost isn't worth it. Of course it's good to have deep, rounded characters in a movie like this instead of just a bunch of thick-skulled teenagers from Dawson's Creek, but this is overkill. You could cut more than half an hour of dialogue scenes out of this movie without really hurting it. But I seem to be in the minority on this one, so if you love this movie go ahead and get it. You could certainly do a lot worse.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: The Birds DVD Rip Off!
Review: I just bought THE BIRDS "Collector's Edition" DVD which plainly says that it includes a "Deleted Scene" and "The Original Ending" but they are not really on there! What you get instead is a peek at the script and some storyboard sketches. This is so misleading I may go back to the store tomorrow and get my money back!

On the plus side you get to see Tippi Hedren's screen test and a little documentary thing called ALL ABOUT THE BIRDS + some newsreel stuff. But I must give this re-release an F for Fooling a Fan! My advice - rent it, tape it, or steal it!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Best From The Best!
Review: The best film from the master of thriller films. It is more exciting, more violent, and more scarier than any Alfred Hitchcock film around. When I first heard of this film, I thought it sounded very stupid. But when I saw it, I thought it was a very interesting "What If?." film. Every fan of this director's work will love this film.


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