Bloody Bird

Bloody Bird may not be the most entertaining slasher film, but it was well ahead of its time in terms of its application of irony. This movie survives on the principle that once you start watching something you’ll keep watching just to see where it goes. This film was not very good, but I kept watching, just to see where it went. Where this film gets all clever is that the killer in this film knows that people will stay until the end. There are countless scenes where people stand around and watch while the killer murders their friends and don’t bother interfering because that would be like standing up and shouting during a play. It would knock the artistic direction off the rails.

The story is about a group of actors who are putting on ballet about a giant owl that tortures and murders prostitutes, but ultimately one of the prostitutes seduces and kills the giant owl. This may sound freaky to those of you who don’t go to the ballet, but once you really think about the plots of The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, this doesn’t seem that far fetched an idea for ballet. I think it’s pretty cool that they call the ballet ‘Night Owl’, because if they called it ‘Hooters’ that restaurant would probably sue.

The lead dancer who plays the prostitute who seduces and kills the giant owl is experiencing ankle pain. One of the stagehands insists on taking her to a doctor to check it out. The stagehand takes her to a mental institution, the dancer finds this odd, but the stagehand argues that psychiatrists are doctors, too. I kinda bought the stagehand’s argument until we see what kind of medical advice the psychiatrist offers. He tells her not to do things that cause pain, and that if she still feels pain she should try painkilling drugs. This doctor also doesn’t have much respect for patient confidentiality because he starts yacking away about how they have a homicidal maniac locked in the next room. He says that this guy used to be an actor and then switched to killing people (kinda like 50 Cent in reverse).

The dancer and the stagehand drive back to the theatre to continue practice, but the homicidal maniac has smuggled himself into the boot of their station wagon. The dancer goes back into the theatre but the stagehand realizes that she forgot to turn the headlights off so she goes back to the car. In the parking lot there’s one of those problems of horror movie editing where they forget to include a shot or two in the right order. The stagehand starts panicking and running around screaming for her life even though she hasn’t seen anything to suggest danger, other than a change in the tempo of the music, but characters aren’t supposed to be able to hear that.

The use of music is pretty obvious in this movie, they speed it up when things are intense and slow it down when the action subsides. But this film was made back in the 1980s before advanced false scare theory had really been taught in film schools. In modern horror films they have stuff like somebody nice coming suddenly into a room but making a loud thunderclap noise so that at first you think they’re bad. Or stuff like cats jumping out of things or somebody dropping something and making a thunderclap noise. In Bloody Bird they compensate for not having that thunderclap noise by trying to use music inappropriately. Superintense synthesized organs start playing at a rapid pace and with dramatic tension during some scenes where a woman just feeds a fish and one shot where a guy is just pushing a trolley. I was expecting the fish to eat the lady’s hand like when that seeing eye dog turns on his master in Suspiria. But no, the music is all intense, but the fish just eats the food and we never see the lady again.

Once the cast and crew find out about the murder of the stagehand they are distraught. The police and press quickly assume it’s that murderous actor who escaped from the mental institution. The ballet’s director decides he’s going to do a quick rewrite to capitalize on the murder of one his staff. He decides that his ballet is going to be billed as a biographical ballet about the murderous actor who just killed one of his staff. He’s still going to depict him as a giant owl, which is reasonable creative license. I wish they’d depicted Ray Charles as a giant owl in that stupid biopic that won all those awards. The director thinks that the irony of having a one of the cast killed by the real life subject of his show will attract an audience. The whole irony thing seems like a longshot as far as marketing ploys go. But I guess the director missed that day in marketing class when they taught tits ‘n ass.

So the actors get on with rehearsal but the killer takes the giant owl costume and comes on stage. The director immediately notices that something’s off. Maybe because it’s a ballet and the owl is no longer dancing like in previous scenes. He’s just walking slowly around the stage with a knife. Then when he starts stabbing one of the actresses it becomes really apparent that lines are being flubbed. The thing about this killer is that he has theatre experience. He knows actors appreciate improv and so they humour him by standing around and watching him stab the one actress multiple times and then slowly exit stage left. So many great lines and moments are thought up by actors just messing around during rehearsals that it makes sense everybody would want to see where he was going with this new stabby interpretation of the scene and so they just let him play it out.

The director obviously didn’t like it and preferred the original scripted version better. So they spend the rest of the movie running around the theatre trying to find a key to get out and weapons to defend themselves. But the killer uses his theatre experience to his advantage time and again. He knows people will keep watching just to find out how it ends. So he continues his unchallenged killings until the only dancer left is the one who plays the prostitute who seduces and kills the giant owl in the play.

Even she gets suckered into the show a bit. The killer owl has dragged the corpses of all her friends onto the stage of the theatre and plays a bit of golf using an axe as the club and a severed head as the ball. The dancer stands there and watches him play out this scene because she’s an actresses and will respect anything anybody else does on stage. The killer preys on this instinct and on the need to be entertained, but he falls short when he stops being entertaining. He gets tired doing his little golf scene and just sits down for a rest with all the mutilated bodies and that’s when it loses that Sam Sheppard unpredictability and Tom Stoppard wit and so the dancer chick regains her senses.

Unlike in the play, she does not seduce the giant owl. She stabs him in the eye, blasts him with a supercharged fire extinguisher, whips him off a catwalk and sets him on fire. But none of this looked terribly erotic, she mostly just skipped to the part where she kills the owl.

She finally makes it out of the theatre and alerts the police. A few days later she’s finding herself still troubled. Not by witnessing and committing all sorts of murder, but by the fact that she dropped what’s described poetically as an “expensive” wristwatch while fighting the giant owl. She flirts with the janitor at the theatre and he lets her back in to recover the wristwatch.

This janitor guy is one huge asshole. He starts making fun of how she didn’t shoot the killer with the pistol she found in his desk. He says he found the pistol on the theatre floor with the safety still on. He just keeps taunting her over and over again about how if he’d been there he would have shot him right between the eyes. He says “right between the eyes” about fifty times during this five minute scene and even poses a bit with the pistol to really rub it in that the dancer fucked up. What a dick. While the actress puts her wristwatch on she uses the kind of advanced mathematics and detective skills that actors have, but the police obviously don’t. She notices that there are police markers for all the dead bodies of her friends but missing the one for the body of the killer.

So then the killer shows up and the janitor shoots him, you guessed it….right between the eyes. He stands there dancing around saying “right between the eyes” over and over. But that doesn’t work. Stupid janitor, you forgot to seduce him first!

Like I said, this film isn’t very good, but you’ll keep watching. And I think this whole play within a play thing was done better in William Brannaughspeare’s The Hamlet, and you’d be better off watching that. I don’t know if most critics would agree with me on that, but I’ll stand by my preference of The Hamlet. The Hamlet actually has even more killing in it and Gerard Depardieu.