Let's be fair. Not everyone has millions of pounds or dollars to spend on making a movie. For every big budget blockbuster that graces the planet, there are many, many movies that could only ever aspire to being so grand. Many of these films are actually quite endearing in their own way and in some cases a new genre has formed in its own right. Welcome to the wonderful world of the horror "B-movie". Originally, of course, B-movies were made and played to accompany the main feature. Nowadays, B-movies are normally cheap, low-tech affairs that need to rely on something other than big bucks to endear themselves to an audience.

The similarities to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds are evident - conceptually, Birds of Prey is roughly about the same idea. Sadly, in the hands of a far less visionary director, and with a far smaller budget, Birds of Prey is unlikely to raise anything more than a flap or flutter.

For me, the film is really rather doomed from the outset in that the premise is simply neither scary nor perilous. It has never ceased to amaze me that you see girls / women in the streets who literally shriek and scream when pigeons flap past them. What is there about these docile birds that could possibly pose a threat? I think I must be missing something because in Birds of Prey, the director relies almost entirely on the idea that birds can be frightening. The trouble is - THEY'RE NOT! The fear factor doesn't escalate with numbers - it doesn't matter how big the flock is, they still don't pose a threat. It's also really rather difficult to suggest that these creatures are life threatening in any shape or form given that they so clearly do not want to kill the cast, regardless of how attempts are made to portray just this.

In some ways, it's a bit of a shame because the basic premise aside, other elements to the film are less cringeworthy. The overall tone of the piece feels a little like The Omen, given only that the European setting has a certain quality to it and that like Damien's demonic possession, the birds in Birds of Prey seem to be acting on behalf of darker forces. (They are, in fact, responding to man's continued destruction of their habitats.) The bird bits are not badly put together, given largely that the makers have opted for real birds or real bird footage. Our two leads work quite well, too. The reporter / cameraman relationship creates some real chemistry and both actors are young, fit and sassy - an essential pre-requisite for when they get an inevitable opportunity to strip off. The script is characteristically corny and misplaced, but then in a film like this, you'd really expect nothing less, so you can be forgiving. Even the ridiculous slow-motion death scenes feel at home in a movie of this nature.

There's enough blood and gore to warrant a distributor-pleasing 18 certificate here, but there's nothing else scary or disturbing going on. Such is the silliness of the whole thing that any charm or appeal is rapidly eviscerated, leaving very little behind to entertain. I was just about able to sit through Birds of Prey, if only to see what happened at the end, but even the (anti) climax is silly, rushed and unfulfilling. Where comparisons to a classic film like The Birds are so likely, Birds of Prey was pretty much always going to fail, but in reality it comes out even worse than you would probably guess.