Death from above?

J and I have taken to watching the Sci-Fi Saturday night movie... on purpose. Honestly, when it's 9 p.m. on Saturday, you're tuckered out from yard work and you just don't feel like going out, oftentimes your best bet on TV is going to be whatever schlock masterpiece the Sci-Fi channel is airing.

We've seen some classics in our time: Mammoth, Dragon Sword, Mansquito, Frankenfish, Ice Cream Man, and the Yeti Trio (Sasquatch, Sasquatch Mountain and Abominable -- all of which, incredibly, have Lance Henriksen in them). So we were expecting something pretty special with this week's offering, Kaw.

(You know, "caw," like the sound a crow makes.) Unfortunately, Kaw actually plays its ridiculous plot straight, resulting in a movie that tries to create terror but only comes up with a feathery mess. I've also come to think of the movie as The Turds.

Looks all creepy, right? The movie starts out all spooky atmosphere as the camera pans over frost-parched fields. Then it lurches into Cheesetown as a sappy, snuggly scene lets us know that today is the town sheriff's last day on the job. And you know what that means: the guano's about to hit the fan. Cut to a barn, where a farmer is poking around his tractor while a few ravens flutter around in the rafters. The farmer runs over a raven as he's backing out of the barn, stops to look at the corpse and... it's on!

J and I stare at this scene, where a grown-ass man is supposedly murdered by six or seven ravens. "What are they gonna do, flap him to death?" I ask. We are never shown how the death is accomplished, but for the next hour of the movie's running time (this thing has serious pacing problems), we're shown scenes of county personnel in the farmer's barn checking out his corpse.

After that, the birds pick on the town drunk, who's trying to repair the school bus -- I'm sorry, what's that? Yes. Yes, they let the town drunk drive the school bus. (J and I start to wonder if the town deserves to survive the raven onslaught.) The drunk guy -- whom I think they even named Earl -- chases the birds off with a shotgun, but not before they send him running into a shed for protection. Several shots of the same bird caw-ing imperiously give the impression that there's a leader to this gang. The leader looks back at Earl (and his dog) as if to say, "We'll finish this later."

From there, the birds take out a couple in a car who stop to investigate the death of a woman who was apparently killed by the ravens while driving through a small tunnel in a truck. Here's the weird thing: if I were a sentient flock of birds (and yes, I am aware of how surreal that whole clause is) and I wanted to kill someone in a car, I'd wait until they were going at a high speed, then block out their windshield. They'd lose control of the car and crash it, and then I'd poop on their corpse. Which is pretty much what the ravens do to the couple who find the dead woman. But their means of dispatching the woman herself is a total mystery.

In fact, as more corpses pop up through the course of the movie, J and I started asking aloud, "How the hell are they killing these people?!" You'd see a person with maybe 7 or 8 ravens on them, squealing in terror, and then suddenly they'd be dead somehow. From ... I dunno, shallow lacerations or something. A few shots indicated that the ravens were eating their victims' brains, but I don't think a raven's beak can pierce a human skull.

See? They didn't even go for her eyes! (Another tactic I might try if I were a murderous flock of birds.)

Ordinarily, I assume that a Sci-Fi movie has no basis whatsoever in reality or science. But it's not like the monsters in this movie were totally fictional. We're not talking about zombies or reconstituted mammoths here; these are earthly birds (who've eaten mad-cow flesh, but still). So I asked the magnificent Dr. Kevin McGowan of Cornell University, an expert on raven and crow behavior, if perhaps ravens could kill a person.

His response? "Well, sure, if you had enough ravens and a weak, stupid, or incapacitated human, ravens could kill a person. But, you could say the same thing about toddlers using their rattles. Ravens just don't have anything very powerful in the way of sharp talons or a beak that can do much harm to a person.  And they only weigh 2 pounds each. A grandma with an umbrella would be a match for, oh, maybe 20 ravens."

So, basically, this armed sheriff is being cowed by 1/7 the fighting force it would take to give a granny with a brolly a fair fight. Maybe this is my problem with Kaw: I was kind of rooting for the birds, and now I know why. If they'd had the main character be an umbrella-toting grandmother (or have the monster be a flock of toddlers with rattles), this movie would have been truly Sci-Fi worthy. Instead, I'll just keep hoping they rerun Mammoth one of these days.

UPDATE! Michael Erwin, a bird expert from the University of Virginia, has weighed in on the Kaw-ntroversy (ow!). In his words, "while it is technically possible for ravens to kill a human, it would take a very lucky blow (for the bird, not the human); that is, either a shot to the temple or through the eye orbit into the brain. The only case I know of where a bird killed a person was a young biological technician who had captured a sandhill crane and was going to band it. The crane took exception to the plan, and rammed his knife-like bill between the eyes of the technician into his brain, killing him." Wow. Now that would've been a great Sci-Fi Original Movie moment. (Much better than Kaw, anyway.)

Erwin also considers the whole "mad cow" business to be ridiculous, but notes "Birds are known, however, to suffer from temporary inebriation (when they eat fermented berries) and who knows where that could lead? Maybe they do things as bizarre as some drunk people!" That's a genuinely terrifying image right there, so I'll leave you with the image of drunk-ass birds, looking to pick a fight and dry-hump high-school girls before puking into a mop bucket and passing out. Why do we need fiction when there's plenty of horror in real life?

Comments

[Mindi]

My husband and I love to catch the Sci-fi movie, too, but nothing could compare to HammerHead - Shark Frenzy that we caught about a year ago. All about a mad scientist that somehow morphed his son into a shark-human hybrid and then tried to get the shark to rape and impregnate his former fiance (I'm assuming that the fiance thing was prior to being mostly shark, but I could be wrong, it wasn't really made clear)..

Seriously, catch it if it goes on re-runs... it's a worthwhile watch!

:)

[Catherine Cantieri]

I've actually seen it!! Yes, it is a classic; I don't know how it slipped my mind. The Amazing Acting Lips of Hunter Tylo deserve their own credit, poor distended things. And didn't you love how the hammerhead could attack in, like, 6 inches of water? Good times!