Spoiler alert!

After having posted my latest post on El Tango de Roxanne, it became clear that there are still lots of movies I have to see. There are so many classic movies, and good movies, and I haven’t seen even half of them! But sometimes, tv will help you out.
A few days ago, namely, The Birds would be on tv. We recorded it, because everyone knows this movie, and well, it’s worth watching it, right? So two days ago, we started watching this recorded movie. But we started watching quite late, so we only saw a part of it, and promised each other to watch the rest the next day. So yesterday, we sat down in front of the tv again, and watched the rest of it.

It’s quite fun to watch a movie that was made when my father was still very, very young. It’s full of dialogues, and special effects that are really fake now. When Melanie drives her car, the background is so obviously fake… Or when the birds attack the children, you can see they don’t really run there. But okay, at that time, it must have been spectacular. And sometimes, we agreed that the tension was built up very well. When Melanie sits on a bench, with a playground behind her, and the birds start collecting… It starts with two or three birds, but it ends up with a massive amount of birds just waiting to attack, and she doesn’t see them.

The same tension was built up when Melanie and the Brenners are at the Brenner’s house, hiding for the birds, and Melanie hears a sounds. Electricity is gone, so it’s all dark. Melanie takes an oil lamp and climbs the stairs…It’s a freaky moment, I was near to frightened. I like this kind of tension more than well, other kinds. I don’t like ‘physical’ horror movies, with limbs cut off and stuff. The psychological terror can be equally or even more frightening, and is less ‘cheap’.

Next to frightening, this movie was also cute. The fake backgrounds, the manners of that time, the fashion, all of that was just plain cute. Props for the actors though, because they were actually great. Somehow, I thought that acting wasn’t nearly as good as it’s supposed to be now, but I was wrong.

But then. We were desperately waiting for an explanation, a plot, while I was saying “Release the love birds! Release them!”, as I believed the birds attacked because of the love birds. All the while, we were scared that the movie would not be fully recorded, because we saw there wasn’t much movie left, and the end wasn’t even near. We believed. So the Brenners and Melanie get into Melanie’s car, they drive off, and then, all of sudden-

Publicity!

The end of the recorded movie!

We were like ‘Noooooo! We want to see the ending! We have to see the ending! Why can’t that stupid thing record the entire movie!’ So today, I desperately searched for the movie on YouTube, on Dailymotion, on Google, because it seemed to be nowhere. We found it on some site, went straight to the end, only to discover that this version stopped at the very same moment. Suspicion was growing. We found another site which offered the movie. According to Wikipedia, it had the right duration, so we went straight to the end once more, only to find out that the end…

… was what we had seen: the Brenners and Melanie driving off. No explanation, now release of the love birds, no solution or whatsoever.

We were terribly disappointed. I mean, you call that an ending? I don’t. I’m still convinced that if they just had released those pokerfacing love birds, everything would have been alright. I’m not pleased to find out that in fact we had seen the entire movie, but I must admit that it left me with an uncomfortable feeling. So somehow, it was well done.

But the ending just sucked.

The taglines to the movie made me laugh…: