In the world of crap horror films about the natural world (Strays, Frogs, Rattlers, Rottweiler etc, etc) there can be hardly a creature left that bargain-basement filmmakers haven’t employed in increasingly vain attempts to scare us.
Not content with simply joining such exalted ranks, Sheldon Wilson’s Kaw also gives us one of the worst names for a horror movie in recent memory (although I suppose Cuckoo, Peewit or TwitTwoo would have been even less effective). As you’ve probably guessed, this one is about birds gone bad – ravens, to be precise.
It would be silly to attempt such a movie without at least acknowledging the daddy of this minuscule subgenre, Hitchcock’s 1963 The Birds. Writer/director Wilson is savvy enough to fill his film with nods to that classic, most notably casting its star Rod Taylor in a substantial role; the trouble is, Wilson can’t – even with whirling clouds of CGI ravens Hitch could only have dreamt of – summon any of the atmosphere of growing oppression and daylight dread that the Master achieved with far more limited means.
Anyone who dislikes The Birds’s resolute ambiguity and disquieting open-endedness, though, will be happy that Kaw at least provides an explanation for the avian aggression on display: the inveterate carrion-eaters have been pecking away at the carcasses of BSE-infected cattle on a Mennonite community farm; and these equally blackclad weirdoes have decided to hush the whole thing up, given that it’s clearly a sign from God that they’ve been mixing with outsiders too much. I’m not sure what sort of message this sends out about Mennonites, but on the whole Kaw is at least a well-made effort, with effective cinematography and good performances (not least from some of the birds), but once again shows that Wilson (whose Shallow Ground was full of initial promise) can’t sustain a film for its entire length without resorting to tired clichés and suspense-by-numbers.
And what’s it all about? There are undoubtedly some metaphors lurking beneath the surface here, but without the rich architecture of psychosexual meaning that bubbles through Hitchcock’s far superior movie, you’d have to paraphrase Freud and say that, in movies like this, sometimes a bird is just a bird.
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