No. 8 Dead Birds (2004) 20 of 100

 

This period horror/drama is quite early Shannon, but he does muster 4^th billing in what has to be said a low budget offering. The two stars who have their names before the title are Henry Thomas and Patrick Fugit – if the child stars of E.T. and Almost Famous rock your boat then this could be the film for you.

We open in the American Civil War era with a group of soldiers depositing some cash at a bank. It seems like a straightforward transaction but there is a lot of bad acting, long pauses and faffing over paperwork. It seems like something is a bit fishy, but before this is explored a bunch of bandits show up to rob the bank.

Shannon is among their number playing Clyde, whose main character point is that he wears a funny hat. He is outgunned by another gang member who didn’t get the memo and showed up as a Droog out of ‘A Clockwork Orange’.

The bank raid is pretty bloody with a head explosion and plenty of claret on the walls. The bandits take some shots themselves and their gratuitous killing of a child suggests redemption won't be coming their way any time soon. They plan to head to Mexico to split the loot but owing to their injured, they decide to take refuge in an abandoned plantation house. HUGE mistake.

Before they reach the building they encounter, and kill, a skinless creature that appears from the corn. Undeterred they head in with a dark and wet night ahead of them. Strangely with the law on their tail, with injured and with unexplained creatures running about they decide to split up and, as you’d probably guess, they start to get bumped off by mysterious forces.

We get small snippets of what has gone before, with one bandit finding a book which he immediately deduces is a spell to raise the dead. Another encounters a ghost who is big on exposition who tells him he tried to resurrect his wife but succeeded only in turning his children into demons – that will happen if you don’t read the instructions. As the numbers whittle down the men start to fight over the gold and we have to wonder who will survive the night and can this nightmare ever end?

Well it does after about 83 minutes of the biggest pile of cliché ridden tosh you’ll ever see. The premise is so hackneyed with a group spending a night in a haunted house only to be decimated by unknown forces. There were long periods with no dialogue and then some predictable jump scares as the monsters jumped out like so many crappy Halloween marionettes. The monsters were mostly poor CGI and looked totally incongruous against an Old West setting.

I had zero investment in any of the characters, not least Shannon who dialled it in with an occasional Southern drawl when he remembered to do it. His death happens off screen but he does get a good outcome as a sort of zombie scarecrow.

Overall the film was poor with an obviously small budget hampering what could have been a decent, if unoriginal offering. A lot of parts don’t seem to have been cast with actual actors and the effects are mostly rubbish. There was one good bit where a woman was disembowelled by an unseen entity but most of the violence was comic in its extremity and it was strange that they were so coy with their only sex scene.

The ending of this film was a bit like ‘Ghost Ship’ with the horrors about to be reset for the next set of weary visitors – I just hope that adventure isn’t committed to film. Overall a derivative and convoluted mess that Shannon does well to stay in the background of – apart from when he’s a big racist or playing Worzel Gummidge’s zombie cousin.

When is Shannon-On? - 04.29

Outcome? Strung up as a likely possessed scarecrow

Film 2/5

Shannon Stars 2/5