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Cincinnati Post (14/Mar/1994) - Sequel to 'Birds' classic nothing to crow about

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Sequel to 'Birds' classic nothing to crow about

The crows in my neighborhood are two feet high and have been known to chase dogs, so I wasn't a bit surprised to find them starring in "The Birds II: Land's End" (8 p.m. Saturday, on Showtime), a sequel of sorts to Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece. More gruesome but a lot less compelling than the original, the tale doesn't pick up where Hitchcock left off. Instead, crediting a story by Daphne du Maurier, it follows Ted and May (Brad Johnson and Chelsea Field) as they arrive for a summer on the East Coast's Gull Island, where she'll work for the newspaper and he'll finish his master's thesis in biology. Actually, they (with their two daughters and their dog) are supposed to be forgetting, finally, the death of their son five years before. But they keep getting distracted by dead birds and dead bodies washing up on the beach. The dead birds are coated in oil; the live ones are massing, and they're mad. (There's a vague environmental message here, but what is supposed to have stirred the birds up this time eluded me.) Of course, no one believes Ted, or eccentric lighthouse keeper Karl (Jan Rubes), when they sense trouble — except, that is, for storekeeper Helen, and that's because she's Tippi Hedren, who in another life was pursued by "The Birds." "The Birds II" doesn't quite lay an egg, but its only real justification for being is to make us want to see the original again. Thoughtfully, Showtime provides it (with an introduction by Miss Hedren) at 9:30, right after the premiere of the sequel.