Mystery DVD Club No 23: Flu Birds

Jenny Sanders

Anybody who hangs on to the belief that a film needs a storyline will be baffled by the absence of one here, especially as it seems to warrant one

We've dug up a potential classic in our latest Mystery DVD Club. But what will Jenny make of Flu Birds?

Published on Oct 23, 2009

Oh I get it. I had swine flu, so they sent me a film about flu birds. Do you see?

It's a tenuous link, but no more tenuous than the idea that this film is about birds. It's about flying things, I'll grant you, but they're whacking great monstrosities that most certainly do not sing. What has apparently happened is that they used to be birds, but the flu (do you see?) has transformed them into ‘vicious predators' (whacking great monstrosities). Why is this? I do not know. Nor do I know why they decide to attack one particular town. Or why they pick on six teenagers on some kind of outdoor juvenile detention camp.

What I do know is that this film is of the standard that implies that you will be likely to be seeing it on Zone Horror +1 at some point in the not-too-distant future*. It looks quite good. The CGI is surprisingly solid. It's got giant flying things. And yet, it's rubbish. But at least it's not offensive rubbish.

There are some streetwise, petty criminal kids in the woods. They get set on by some weird mutant creatures and take refuge in a military bunker while the authorities try to work out what caused the disease. The trouble is, that's the plot - as in, the beginning and the end of the plot.

In 95 minutes we never manage to get any further than that. Anybody who hangs on to the belief that a film needs a storyline will be baffled by the absence of one here, especially as it seems to warrant one.

The problem seems to be that everything has taken place before the film starts. The ‘birds', which were, presumably, nice little tweety things at some point, have already undergone their transformation into the embodiment of evil. Instead of a progression from, say, testing stuff on monkeys to accidentally letting all the germs out to zombies to oh-dear-god-what's-that?, we join proceedings when they have already proceeded, and therefore they proceed no further.

If you think this review is getting nowhere, I have made my point. The disc has a few trailers on it, and one of those is for Shark In Venice, which makes my point a bit more. Whether you find this film under the name Flu Birds, FLU-BIRDS or Flu Bird Horror, there are no birds and very little flu. And, much like Shark In Venice, no sharks.

* This has started happening with several horror films I reviewed last year. To my own horror I discovered that this generates a worrying desire to watch them again, when I didn't want to watch them in the first place!