It's "The Birds." Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," to be more exact. This is the movie that music video director Dave Meyers dares to compare with his film "The Hitcher" by having Sophia Bush watch the horror classic as she rests in bed on a dark and stormy night after being chased by a homicidal maniac.
Let me rephrase that: Dave Meyers references Alfred Hitchcock's legendary "The Birds" in his insanely boring, 78-minutes too long, incredibly moronic remake of a crappy original, B-grade horror movie, "The Hitcher."
What was he trying to do? Remind us all of how horendously stupid Sophia Bush and Zachary Knighton are as road-tripping college students who never even once consider just telling their story to the police in comparison with the intelligent heroes in Hitchcock's film?
Or maybe he was attempting to show a glimpse of the kind of coherent directing that builds suspense and terror instead of dragging out a plot that might, just barely, make a decent 30 minute episode of the "Twilight Zone" (the remake, not the original).
The only part of the film that kept my eyes from closing faster than the doors on a Metro train was when Sean Bean — as the notoriously nasty Hitcher, John Ryder — takes out three cop cars and a police helicopter with a hand gun, all while driving a classic black Pontiac Firebird. It's an action-packed five minute rock video stuck inside 78 minutes of "Yanni: Live on Stage."
Bean is the only thing close to Hitchcockian as his Ryder (Get it? He rides in cars) is one of the creepiest psychopaths since Norman Bates. His blatant killing is chilling, and a nice change of pace from the "hide in the shadows" monsters in most horrors. But when your performance and character are surrounded by a plot that is based on two protagonists who act more like Harry and Lloyd from "Dumb and Dumber" than college scholars, it doesn't matter how good your acting is — the movie is going to be bad and the director shouldn't remind us how bad it is by bringing up Hitchcock.
It would of been funny or ironic to have the original "The Hitcher" playing on the TV — even an equally crappy slasher film would have worked — but by putting on the "The Birds," Meyers just makes his film's failure even more prevalent.
And just by coincidence guess what is one of the next movies "The Hitcher" producer, James Form (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Amityville Horror), is going to be butchering with another poorly directed remake: "The Birds." Horror fans rejoice.