Delayed Reaction: Dead Birds

Premise: Confederate bandits hide out overnight at an abandoned farmhouse where crazy things start happening.

With TV, it's commonly accepted that a good pitch does not necessarily make a good show. High concept shows have nice hooks that are easy to sell, but so often, the most successful shows come down to simple concepts like "there's these six friends" or "there's this bar". It's hard to pitch those, but they have longevity. The same principle doesn't exact carry over to movies. Plenty of my favorite movies are based on ideas that are designed to be attention-grabbing ("Harold Crick begins to hear a narrator in his head who announces his impending death"). Just as many though have trouble expressing what's good about them from pitch alone ("Two co-dependent friends try to make it to a party" undersells Superbad significantly). So, I should know better than to be attracted to a movie just because the premise sounds wild.

Look, there aren't many Western supernatural horror movies out there. It's a fun idea. That's not a period where many people think horror. That's the main reason I decided to give Dead Birds a try. It was also written by Simon Barrett, one of my favorite horror writers (V/H/S, V/H/S/2, You're Next), but I didn't realize that at the time. The promise of the pitch didn't carry through to the actual movie. Dead Birds is a pretty traditional horror movie at its core. Specifically, it's got a lot of the dumb tropes that annoy me. People constantly split up. They repeatedly ignore huge warning signs. I get that the characters don't realize they are in a horror movie, but how are none of them that freaked out by the creature they kill at the very beginning? The Western setting doesn't even add much. The script could be used for virtually any time period with hardly a rewrite. There's nothing uniquely Western about it other than the production design (which was good, but not impressive enough to justify the decision).

It had a stronger cast than I was expecting, with Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit, pre-Oscar nomination Michael Shannon, pre-Sons on Anarchy Mark Boone Junior, and pre-Grey's Anatomy Isaiah Washington. Nicki Aycox is the only person who was fully new to me. Horror doesn't really need big names though. Shannon had room for a breakout performance. Instead, he played this one pretty much as expected.

The movie is decently exciting. It has some good jump scares. The ending is nicely anti-climactic. This movie is pretty rightly forgotten, but it's OK.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend