The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds (1965)

The idea surrounding "lost" films is so fascinating to me. That X amount of people worked together to bring an idea to life is a feat in and of itself. To have it slip away from the public's pop culture consciousness is... relatively sad. To have it almost entirely erased from film history due to poor storage conditions is just tragic. This is exactly what (almost) happened to the exploitation film, The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds.

The history of this rediscovered cheapie is a bit vague as there's not too much information about it available online, but it seems that the film was considered lost forever after a storage unit containing the original negative went up in flames. Yet lost films work in mysterious ways and a private collection was sold to the good people over at the Harvard Film Archive for safekeeping, which eventually came to the attention of Nicolas Winding Refn. Refn has been prepping byNWR for sometime now (which is now up and running here), which is designed to serve as a free streaming space for lost and forgotten exploitation/trash/tasteless films. And on top of that, all the films have received new transfers! I had honestly forgotten about this project till I stumbled across the above poster earlier this morning and immediately dove in.

Written, produced, directed by and starring Bert Williams, Cuckoo Birds is a trashy Southern Gothic. Imagine a cheap Tennessee Williams play adapted by a Floridian exploitationeer, complete with mad dashes of brilliance that wouldn't be seen again till two years later with Spider Baby or  (much later) with Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Eaten Alive films. Just don't let the word "brilliance" throw you off. This is not a good movie by any means. It's an underground hodgepodge of "huh?" and "huh." It's an oddity, for sure, complete with crocodiles, terrible makeup and a naked lady who stabs people by the swamp as fast as the undercranking would allow her. Yet there was something here that I just couldn't shake, something that kept me compelled to finish this with as little interference as possible.

Perhaps it's the idea that a "new", "lost" film has premiered in our circuit. If there's one thing that genre fans love it's elder worship. Tell us that the newly discovered "X" film has roots that ties into "Y" film and people will flock to see it, including me. And, since we're all really just chasing the high of the first season of True Detective, I'll jump at any chance to see a Southern Gothic.

And for you genre history buffs, a little anecdote: this film was made around the same time fellow Florida exploiters Doris Wishman and Herschell Gordon Lewis were creating their own trashterpieces. But, is this movie even worth seeing? Depends. Do you house a passing desire to watch some old exploitation? You can do better: watch Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, or The Last House on the Left. Already seen those and want to dig deeper? Then definitely check this one out.