Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema. We’ve got ourselves one of the all-time most ill-advised sequels for this week’s review. Yup, it’s the 1994 made-for-television shitbomb The Birds II: Land’s End.

If we were to start with the fact that The Birds II was an Alan Smithee film, you’d understand something kind of interesting in terms of the history of this blog. This is the very first time I’ve ever covered a movie directed by the notable Alan Smithee. The Alan Smithee moniker was a famous pseudonym given to movies in which the director refused to take credit. Basically, it’s for troubled productions and movies so bad the director just throws his hands up and disowns it. It wasn’t supposed to be a thing we outsiders were to be aware of. It was only after mainstream attention was brought to the pseudonym in the late 90s did the Directors Guild of America retire the name.

The Birds II was actually directed by Rick Rosenthal. We know Rosenthal for Halloween: Resurrection. However, he made a far superior Halloween sequel when he did Halloween II in 1981. Rosenthal has done stuff all up and down the scale of good and not-so-good. But he’s mostly worked in television and has been nominated twice for Primetime Emmys.

It’s not totally out of bounds to think that a Hitchcock film could have a sequel. Psycho II is quite a good film and Psycho III is notable for being kind of kooky in interesting ways. But, outside the various sequels and other things based on Psycho, no other property of Hitchcock’s garnered a sequel up through the 1980s. So, the thought of making a TV movie sequel for The Birds seemed ill-advised at best and downright sacrilegious at worst. Considering the budget, the quality of actors, the cheapness of how it looked, and Rosenthal needing his name removed and replaced by Alan Smithee, The Birds II: Land’s End takes the cake for having a pretty awful reputation.

The film premiered in March 1994 on the premium cable channel Showtime. It did not do well at all. I remember the hubbub around it coming to television then and later remember when it was released on VHS, but don’t really remember if I actually watched it then. It stars Brad Johnson who was maybe better known for being a model and one of the Marlboro Man actors in print ads back in the 80s. Johnson passed away in 2022 due to complications from COVID-19. Don’t smoke, kiddos.

Starring opposite Johnson as his wife is Chelsea Field. We’ve seen her before as Teela in Masters of the Universe. She’s been more recently seen as a regular on NCIS: New Orleans as Rita Devereaux. I’m not saying she slept her way onto that show, but she is married to the lead actor on that show, Scott Bakula. I’m just kidding. Good for them being together for, like, 25 years.

One more quick note I want to make about the cast. There is a “Game Warden” listed in the credits for this movie. It’s played by C.K. Bibby. Now, I wouldn’t expect anyone to know who C.K. Bibby to be…. unless you watched the same movie I did last week, Unmasking the Idol. Yup! C.K. Bibby played Star, Duncan Jax’s boss in that movie. Talk about your happy little accidents.

So, let’s go back to this being an ill-advised sequel. 1963’s The Birds was Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic follow-up to his world-beating thriller Psycho. It’s often known as a particularly memorable thriller once the birds start attacking, but, in the grand scheme of things, not usually considered one of Hitchcock’s best. In fact, while Psycho is generally considered Hitchcock’s most memorable, it’s not always as well thought of as, say, Rear Window or Rebecca or Strangers on a Train. Don’t get me wrong, Psycho is incredibly important for mainstreaming horror and, more or less, creating the slasher genre. However, that’s the movie he’ll forever be remembered for because that’s the movie of his most people have seen.

So The Birds was the follow-up to Psycho. It’s got some similarities to its predecessor. Tippi Hedren is a pretty, but somewhat flawed, blonde. There’s an angle of a jealous mother figure. But I bet if you ask anyone on the street to tell you what the movie The Birds is about, you’ll mostly hear it’s about a girl being attacked by birds. But, now, just hear me out here… Did you know there’s a whole ass movie surrounding the attacking birds?!?

Right? I know!

The first indication of actual weirdness with birds doesn’t show up until 47 damn minutes into the movie when a bird smashes itself dead into the door of Suzanne Pleshette’s house. Sure, there are lots of shots of flocking birds and a mention of a seemingly unending migration period for the gulls in Bodega Bay, but it takes a very, very, very long time getting to the goddamn birds starting to act strange beyond one-off incidents. It’s actually a surprisingly uninteresting movie. Tippi Hedren plays Melanie Daniels who is a socialite who gets confronted by hunky Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) about a prank she pulled that went awry. She gets interested in him and follows him to Bodega Bay, California. Mitch’s mother, played by Jessica Tandy, is a weirdo and doesn’t like Mitch having girlfriends.

At Mitch’s younger sister’s birthday party, some seagulls suddenly, and inexplicably start attacking and starts messing people up pretty bad. There’s no explanation for the attacks and the attacks mostly take up the back half of the movie. Granted, there are some memorable moments in the movie. You have Tippi Hedren in the phone booth while birds attack. You have hundreds and hundreds of birds sitting around and watching characters and you’re not sure when, or if, they will attack. So, yeah, lots of memorable stuff.

However, I have to kind of chuckle a bit because there’s one fairly infamous movie that is clearly inspired by The Birds. Yeah, I’m talking about Birdemic. Birdemic almost follows the exact same story beats as The Birds. However, I refuse to cover the low-hanging fruit that is Birdemic. What I will say about it is that, unless you know that movie through seeing it a few times as I have, you will likely only remember the horrible effects and silly acting that happens during the bird attacks. You might not realize that the birds don’t start attacking until the midway point of the movie. The first part of the movie is about Rod and Nathalie becoming a couple. There’s a whole 45 minutes of them getting together and going on dates and montages of their lives and such before the movie fades out and fades back into birds dive-bombing and exploding.

And, yes, I did, in some weird way, compare the quality and pacing of The Birds to Birdemic, but let’s stop with that shit and look at Birds II: Land’s End and compare that piece of shit to a movie that, while I don’t love it, is far superior.

The movie opens with a man on a boat fishing out an oily, dead seagull from the ocean. Ominous music plays. He pulls out a beeker and a solution. I presume this is to test if maybe the is oil or whatever. Doesn’t really matter because a fuckin’ crow comes flying by and plucks out his eyes. The seagulls then finish him off.

Holy shit… Literally seconds in and there’s already a bird attack in The Birds II. Eat your fuckin’ heart out, Alfred Hitchcock.

We met the Hocken family. There is father Marlboro Man and mother Teela, and a pair of daughters. I don’t care to know their names right now. There’s also a dog named Scout. I care to know more about the dog’s name than I do the people. That’s… not a great sign?

Anyway, the Hockens have come to Land’s End for the summer. The daughters hate it. I would too. I’d much rather be playing with my friends than hanging out all summer with my folks in some rundown seaside shanty.

Also, I 100% identify with the little girls who get pissed there’s not a single television in the entire house. Gosh. Have to move to a remote island in a house that is remotely located on said remote island. Can’t hang out with friends they’ve grown up and gone to school with. Parents kind of suck. Their big brother got killed… These girls must have it fairly hard.

So yeah, Ted and Mary are here for a change of location and surroundings since their son died. It is confirmed that they are on this island for a few months. Basically, the rest of the summer, and then they’ll go home. The Hockens begin to unload the car and they see the guy’s boat from the cold open. They think it’s kind of odd, but they get called away by Mary asking for help to unload.

The son, Tommy, died in a car accident apparently caused by Ted. Shit like this usually tears families apart, but the Hockens are determined to keep things together. Ted is a high school teacher and plans on staying around the house to work on a thesis so he could eventually get the credentials needed to teach at a college but often gets distracted by the daughters wanting ice cream and keeping up the house. Mary gets a job at the local newspaper, Island Weekly. Mary’s boss, Frank, is needing help understanding how to use his new computer equipment. Because it’s 1994, there are lots of yucks and har hars about computers.

Tippi Hedren makes the obligatory fan service appearance as Helen, the owner and operator of the island’s general store. Hedren would say that while the really small role did pay okay, she wished she had a bigger part. She would even go so far as to say it was something of a mistake not to give her a bigger part. I’m curious what the reason would be to only stick her in this small scene. Perhaps because she was playing a different character, it made sense for her to not have that bigger part? It’s possible that there really wasn’t a full-on intention to create a sequel. So, they wanted Hedren involved as a nice tip of the cap to the original but wanted there to not be any confusion about her being a supporting or leading character.

Whatever the reason, she hates to think what Hitchcock would have thought of her appearing in this. It’s rather well-known that Hitchcock and Hedren had a very tumultuous relationship. It was so bad, some called his behavior toward her “obsessive” while she also credibly accused him of touching her inappropriately. Hitchcock never had a great relationship with his actors, but it seems the worst was with Tippi Hedren. During a later interview, she would even go so far as to say the experience working on the sequel as pretty awful too.

Just as dinner is about to be served, Scout chased a bird outside and then eventually brought it inside. The bird was injured so they put it in a box to convalesce. The girls are ultimately allowed to keep the bird as a pet as it heals.

The next day, Ted begins working to restore the exterior of the house because he seems unable to get work done on his thesis. As he’s up on the ladder, he’s attacked by a seagull that knocks him to the ground and cuts his forehead. Later, Ted’s not exactly happy to see Mary get a ride home from Frank, and it is much later than he expected. He’s also not a fan of Frank’s suggestion that he pick Mary up the next morning for work.

Perhaps Ted should be worried because Frank basically started flirting with Mary instantly upon her arrival at the paper and in front of Ted no less!

Anyway, Ted goes to see Dr. Rayburn who happens to be both the town doctor and the mayor. His office is a specific booth in the local tavern. So I guess that also makes him the town lush. Anyway, ol Doc Rayburn, after Ted shows him the cut on his head from the seagull, says that he’s never heard of a bird attacking people. One of the local fishermen says that the sky is thick with birds if you go a few miles off the coast. It’s not something he’s ever seen quite like that before. While spotting birds over water is usually a good omen for fishermen, he’s been coming up short on his daily catches.

Back to the main story, which I suppose is Frank’s burning loins for Mary. He takes her out for a “lunch date” that she agrees to go on. He talks about how he pretended to be a photographer which then allowed him to get into really important events. When it was determined that he really was a pretty good photographer, he used that skill in Vietnam. After the war, he bummed around various places in the world and took photos and he met his first wife. The scene kind of ends there. It’s funny because Mary learns all about his photography career when it was Ted who recognized the guy’s name and work to begin with.

So the movie doesn’t want you to forget it’s about fuckin’ birds attacking, the dead body of the guy from the cold open washes up right next to the Hocken girls. It also copies one of the more shocking shots of the original film when Jessica Tandy’s character discovers a friend’s body and his eyes have been plucked out by the birds.

I will give The Birds II credit for knowing how to best use its 30-fewer minutes compared to the original. We’ve had multiple moments where birds have done weird things. We flat-out saw them kill the guy at the beginning. We’ve seen them attack Ted. They’ve started amassing much earlier too. All this happened in the first 30 minutes and it took over an hour for the original to get things rocking like this.

Don’t let that make you believe that I think this movie is in a league anywhere near the original. It most definitely is not. It’s just not got any kind of interesting plot. Granted, I don’t love the plot of the original either, but you know. At least this movie makes with the birds quickly.

Now, there is a weird old man who is around the island. When the girls run away screaming after finding the guy washed up on shore, they run right into this weird old guy. He goes around the beach and picks up the bodies of dead birds. The little girls think that maybe he’s the one who killed the guy they found. We’ll circle back around to him in a bit.

Later that night, Ted is in the kitchen having some booze to try to deal with his guilt about the death of Tommy. He hears a tapping on the window and when he goes up to the door’s window, a crow crashes into the door’s window and it cuts Ted’s hand. The next day, Tippi Hedren tells Ted that she knows the birds are acting strange. Her nephew was recently attacked by a bird on his boat.

As the birds continue to gather around the Hockens’ home, Scout begins barking at them. His barking also interrupts the first sexy time Ted and Mary have had in some time. The next day, the girls ask Ted to go bike riding with them. This causes him to miss a call from Mary. This opens the door for her to accept an invitation from Frank to have a beer with him before she goes home.

She explains to Frank that Ted’s not dealing well with the death of their son. She has decided to work on moving on and he’s stuck in the past. Frank says maybe they both go their separate ways. When Mary comes home late, she gets mad at Ted for insinuating that she’d rather spend time with Frank than with him.

That’s when Karl, the lonely lighthouse keeper, and the best character in the film bar none, comes to break up the tension. He arrives with a giant fish he caught and cleaned today. Realizing it was way too much for an old man to eat all alone, he brought the fish to the Hockens. Ted invites him to stay for dinner. Karl tells the girls stories about pirates and fun little bits of history about the island. As he becomes friends with the family, the girls realize that Karl is not the scary possible murderer they thought he was originally.

Karl also knows that there are more birds than he’s ever seen before.

Again, the movie cannot wait to get back to its A plot. No, not the birds. Frank’s raging hard-on for Mary. As she teaches him how to do layouts for the paper on the computer, he kisses her. When Mary recoils and steps away from him, Frank says that he thought that was what she wanted. Mary says she’s not sure.

You know what pisses me off about this dumb plotline? It insinuates that she thinks Ted should just fucking get over the fucking death of their son. She has decided to move on, so why hasn’t he? She hasn’t thought that maybe he should get professional help? Has she even considered that maybe he shouldn’t just push the pain down and there needs to be some sort of legitimate help sought for this? I know that there are constant references to the Hockens’ Christianity, so did she just pray over it and then stash the feelings away? Is Ted less of a man because he can’t just do that and needs some way to properly reconcile his feelings and guilt over the accident?

Oh whatever… Have at ’em, birds!

Earlier in the movie, the girls’ bird that they got to keep after Scout brought it into the house escaped. When it suddenly returns to tap on their window, they let it in. Unfortunately, they left the window open and a bunch of crows and seagulls come in and attack. They peck and claw at Mary while Ted tries to ward them off by flinging around a shirt. After giving Ted what for, the birds leave.

The next day, as they clean up the mess left behind by the attack, Karl shows up and comes with evidence that there are birds showing up on the island that are not native to anywhere near this area of the world. One bird that Karl found, and later identified as a fairly common bird, isn’t common to Land’s End. It’s common to Brazil. When presented with this information, Mayor Doctor Rayburn doesn’t want to have any of it. It’s a little bit of a Jaws sort of thing with the Mayor not wanting to upset the fishing industry that everyone makes their money from on the Island.

In a relatively stunning change of pace for a movie, there’s a third act make-up. I’m not sure if this is because Ted started taking charge with this whole bird thing or if it’s just because the movie demands these two not be torn apart by a horny photog. Either which way, I’m not against the idea of them getting back together instead of having the third act breakup.

Ted visits with Karl who spent hours watching the birds come in with the tide. He tells Ted that something like this has happened before out on the west coast. About 30 years ago, the attack at Bodega Bay had a couple days of absolute shock and terror from attacks by birds and crows. Ted tells Mary they should get on tomorrow’s ferry and get the hell out of there.

That night, Karl is looking out his window at the number of birds getting bigger and bigger on the coast. Meanwhile, one of the little Hocken girls goes looking for Scout who is watching and barking at the birds on the fence. As she brings Scout back inside, seagulls are flying by her and gathering around her. A falcon or eagle or some sort of bird of prey divebombs the girl and Scout snags it out of the air and starts biting at it. Unfortunately, the birds retaliate and ultimately kill Scout the dog.

The birds attack the house and cut the phone line and the electricity. They begin pecking at the door and windows trying to get inside. It’s not long before the attack ends and the birds fly away with no real explanation as to why they stopped the attack.

While that’s great news for the Hockens, the bad news is that there are a bunch of birds attacking the lighthouse. They cause Karl to fall out the window and die. The next morning, Doctor Mayor Rayburn is recalled to his practice to help injured people who had some run-ins with some birds which forces Rayburn to accept that there is a unique bird problem happening on Land’s End.

More and more birds start showing up in town. In addition, the Hockens are trapped as their car is completely fucked by the birds. Ted goes to the lighthouse to get help from Karl, but he finds the old man’s body and a shit ton of dead birds around him. Also… why not have a second old guy who had his eye plucked out?

Karl deserved better, goddammit.

Anyway, Ted gets Karl’s truck and drives it back to the house. In town, Frank has picked up his camera and decided that things are clearly important enough to start snapping pics. He gets a beak to the face that cuts him. Ted and family get to the harbor where they plan to catch the ferry out of town. They aren’t the only ones either. There are a whole lotta people trying to get the hell out of Dodge.

The Mayor and some of the other locals decide they are staying behind and plan to shoot as many birds as they possibly can. Rayburn goes outside to give a piece of his mind to the people trying to escape town by calling them lily-livered mainlanders. A bird attacks him, so one of his goons shoots a bird. This causes all the birds to attack everyone.

When I say attack, I mean they fucking destroy everyone in town. In the confusion, a boat tries to take off from the port, but it pulls out the gas handle. Mayor Dipshit tries jumping onto the boat and right into the gasoline-filled water. When another idiot shoots a bird with a flare gun, it lights the water on fire and it leads back to the gas pump and that explodes killing several, including horny Frank.

I should mention too that it’s entirely possible Tippi Hedren died in that explosion too. She was on the boat that was pulling away and yanked the fuel handle out of the boat. Depending on where all the fire went from the flare gun, the boat she was on possibly exploded too. Either way, we don’t see any other characters aside from the Hockens for the rest of the movie’s runtime.

As the Hockens take off in Frank’s boat, they come across an embankment with hundreds of birds waiting for them. They are able to survive by tipping the boat over and using it to shield themselves. The birds do try to peck through the boat, but eventually leave and head to the mainland.

What makes them stop attacking? Who knows. Will these unexplained attacks ever really end? Probably not. The movie ends with the ominous line that the birds are headed away from the island and toward the mainland. I don’t know if that was meant to mean that there was supposed to be a third film in the series, but, obviously, that never came. What I find really funny about this movie and its predecessor is that the entire premise of the movie instantly puts you into a narrative corner that you can’t get out of. The birds attack. The birds no longer attack. There is no explanation or anything that gives any idea as to why it happens.

“But, Geoff,” you say, “Night of the Living Dead doesn’t give any real explanation for zombies!” Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. However, they do sort of insert at least one possible idea that it was some sort of outer space thing that was brought back from an orbital mission that caused the dead to rise. What I’m really getting at is that these movies just kind of… end. I guess it’s sort of the point that these weird things can happen and maybe we’re not as smart as we think we are because we can’t explain the motives of all that is around us.

Sure, whatever.

The Birds II is not very good. It’s certainly not as bad as Birdemic, but it sucks, to be sure. Again, much like the original, we have a bird attack movie that also goes into family drama shit. There are more layers and a lot more depth to the Hitchcock movie than this one, but it all feels like padding when we really want to see birds attack people.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone watch The Birds II: Land’s End.

That said, what I would do is recommend people come back next week for another B-Movie Enema review. What’s on the docket for September? Why, it’s a whole month of Russ Meyer flicks! Yup! Titties and skin and silliness and titties all around as I flesh out more of the King of the Nudie Flicks’ filmography. I start next week with Common Law Cabin. So, be sure to get your reservations for this tourist trap and be ready to get a face full of knockers!