Birdemic: Shock and Terror

I just got done watching Birdemic for the first time, I knew it was made on 10,000 dollars and it is regarded as one of the worst movies of all time. This same day I also watched The Happening and The Crawling Eye (MST3K version) so maybe I was feeling masochistic. This movie was all around bad in every aspect. It looks like it was shot on a fairly cheap digital video camera and it's obvious that the sound was recorded from the microphone built into the camera instead of a boom mic. I know that because the sound is very awful, the actors have to be pretty close to the camera to be heard right, and there's way too much loud background noise which in post production they played a lot of public domain elevator music to drown out the background noise. The worst audio issue was when they film on the beach because the sounds of the beach are 5 times louder than the actors voices.

The movie itself is very slow paced, the first half of the movie is just the main guy meeting his dream girl and building their relationship. The problem is that nobody in this movie can act and the writing was pitiful so what we get are very bland characters, not even vanilla more like tofu bland. We get no reason to care about these people in any way and to make them less likable the main guy has to talk about solar panels, hybrid cars, global warming, and even the war in Iraq as much as he can. The script is almost a love letter to Al Gore. This feels like an eternity where it goes from his boring job that he is way too enthusiastic about, his obsession with a greener world, and his dates.

The second half of the movie is when the birds finally go on a rampage. Lots of 2D computer generated birds that fly around in circles and attack their prey by hovering in place while moving their wings up and down and making the same noise looped over and over the whole movie. Somehow these berserk eagles can set house on fire as well as kill people in one swoop. The couple ends up meeting another couple who lets them ride in their van, this van has everything from handguns and two AK-47 assault riffles with unlimited ammo (I'm guessing the van has Game Genie,) as well as medical supplies, and anything the plot requires. Most of the movie has these people gunning down birds and searching for survivors. The survivors they meet all have long boring monologues about how it isn't the eagles we should be afraid of, it's global warming and mankind's use of fossil fuels that is responsible for this disaster.

As far as the action goes, it's about as lame as the trailer makes it look. When someone dies it's just a bird hovering in front of the person and they fall down with blood make up on them. There's also some really pointless scenes there just to raise the body count like a man who pulls a gun on them (even though they still have an assault riffle that they seem to forget about for the rest of the movie)who wants their gas, which they say cost them 100 dollars a gallon. There's a whole lot of nothing interesting going on. At least companies like Troma can take a 10 cent movie and throw in lots of nudity, over the top gore, and comedy. The people behind Birdemic have the worst CGI effects since the old Star Trek movies and long speeches about the environment. If you watch it, bring some friends and laugh at it because it works in that regard. Other than that it's Duck Hunt: The Movie.

Given that "Birdemic" has been blasted by many critics, I think I should say something positive about it to start off with. The scenery of Half Moon Bay is agreeable, for one thing, and Ms. Moore has at least a modicum of charisma; also, anyone who appreciates a stylish blue hybrid Mustang rolling along in a stately manner gets to savor that very sight in many lingering shots. All positive aspects of this film.

Less positive aspects of this film are legion, so much so that I'm reminded of my wish that IMDb.com would allow a vote on a scale from 1 to 100 rather than 1 to 10 (in which case "Birdemic" would rate at least a 3 out of 100 for the reasons mentioned, and perhaps a 4 for meaning well (though the message about global warming comes across in a preachy and ham-handed manner)). Still, something about the profoundly amateurish quality of this film makes it feel a little unfair to rate it at all ~ in much the same way that it would feel wrong to grade a term paper on the basis of some rough notes jotted down before writing the paper rather than the paper itself. This film very much reminds me of a rough draft ~ a sort of rough visualization of what the film would have been if the producer had more resources at his disposal (thus making the upcoming larger-budget sequel all the more intriguing).

Yet, I wonder if this film might have been less entertaining if it were better made. If it featured better sound, editing, writing, acting, direction and special effects, it might just be a forgettable homage to "The Birds"; its very flaws elevate (or should I say depress?) it to a special level otherwise occupied by a few special films like "The Room" and "Manos: the Hands of Fate" ~ the legendary realm of films that are so bad they're good. So, giving it the benefit of the doubt as a real film and not just a rough draft, I tender my vote of 1 out of 10 and hope that other fans of this film will also give it an appropriately low vote and insure its rightful place on the Bottom 100 (once it gathers the requisite number of votes).

Sometimes there is a film that comes along that boggles the mind. You cannot believe the thing exists, but there it is, paddling its arms forward like a Special Olympics finalist (and no, this is not a joke on the Special Olympics - they're too good for Birdemic: Shock and Terror). The movie tricks a viewer like yours truly; at first, having not seen anything made by its director, the inimitable James Nguyen - he has two other films to his credit, Replica and Julie and Jack, neither seen by me (just as well, one of whom gives its highest praise as "Ed Wood quality" on IMDb) - I wasn't sure what I was really seeing, if it was either the highest or lowest of artistic expression.

The film takes place in some sunny seaside community on the California coast - as we're made PAINFULLY CLEAR in the opening from-the-car driving shots (immediately calling to mind the opening credits of Manos: The Hands of Fate) - and is about how Rod (Alan Bough) and Nathalie (Whitney Moore), who meet one day by chance, he a successful solar-panel salesman and she a Victoria's Secret model (she just made the cover!) Oh, and there's an almost inexplicable warning of a crazy-killer bird epidemic on the news, from, um, I guess it's global warming. And after about a half hour of almost *nothing* going on between these two pieces of cardboard-as-actors, the birds finally arrive.... oh yes, how they arrive.

What I mean by my uncertainty of what I was seeing, it felt like a double-edged sword. I kept thinking during the film, 'either Nguyen is a total genius, crafting the most intentionally bad movie in recent memory, or he's quite possible the most sickening hack you've never wanted to meet.' It's one thing that the film was shot on a shitty camcorder. It's another that the actors appear to be non-professionals or at best from community theater (Alan Bagh is so stiff he just might make your eyes bleed; Moore is too hot to have that happen, though her talent is just as nill).

But it's something else how absolutely, and surprisingly consistently, awful the film-making is. Even if you've never taken a class in proper lighting or sound or stage direction or editing, Birdemic shines so mightily in its crap-ness. Scenes start and end without a proper marker, as if the editor didn't know how to flow from one scene- one SHOT- to the next. Sound is completely mis-matched from one shot to the next. The music is the kind of synthesizer work that cranked up loud enough could drive Bin-Laden out of his cave (they even go as far as to rip-off the John Lennon song "Imagine" for a girl character wearing a "Imagine Peace" shirt. And the birds... oh, boy, the birds (if you need further proof, watch the trailer, do yourself a favor and get it out of the way).

Now, again, experiencing this film, especially in the case I had in a theater with people perhaps anticipating its awfulness based on the trailer or the website or the claim by Nguyen to be a "Master of the Romantic Thriller" (Trademarked. I'm not kidding), that this is perhaps just a brilliant prank, a satire of epic proportions. Certainly the "message" part of the movie- and it's wielded with such a sledgehammer it would make Stanley Kramer look like Jim Jarmusch - is done to such a ludicrous extent, with characters appearing for walk-on scenes like a Old-man Biologist who appears to explain that the birds were caused by man's harm to the planet, or the "Tree-Man" in the woods who has a tree-house home and finds the birds don't attack him because he's in the woods and not out on the road like the rest of stupid man-animal civilization. Not to mention the rather *listen to us now* attitude of the main characters driving their hybrid cars and seeing An Inconvenient Truth (I s**t you not, this is in the movie) and their silly solar panels. Who ever heard of that working really well?

All of this could, potentially, really be just a put-on of such a magnitude that I would want to shake Nguyen's hand for pulling off such a feat. But, no, Nguyen took himself very seriously during this production, only slightly changing his tune after the fact of people seeing the film like the audience in The Producers seeing "Springtime for Hitler" for the first time (if you need proof, look at this NY Times article quote: "I never went to film school," Mr. Nguyen said. "But I did go to what you'd call the film school of Hitchcock cinema."). I'll give him that he had persistence in getting the film out there, even showing it in bars around the Sundance film festival when he couldn't get in. The masses of sober people puking all around him should have given him a clearer idea of what he had though.

Oh, don't get me wrong, Birdemic is absolutely, hysterically, historically, gloriously funny. It's a magnificent fresco of horrible CGI (the birds just float, like a screensaver), and non-existent acting, and plot that... wait, what plot? And who needs an ending that makes sense either, or shots that match up? It's so funny that I ended up feeling just a wee-bit guilty by the end. It's easy to mock this movie, like a bully on the playground mocking the kid with Cerebal Palsy. If the film isn't an intentional anti-film, then it's just a really bad Manos/Ed-Wood level movie, and all of the hilarity that ensues from it is kind of expected. It's not even worthy of Asylum DVD status. Alongside The Room, After Last Season, and Severed Ways, it's one of the real no-budget bad-movie finds of the past ten years. A must-see, for every wrong reason imaginable.

Rod runs into former classmate model Nathalie. Global warming and blah blah. Birds attack.

Horrible acting. Horrible writing. Badly stilted dialogue. Ill-fitting music. Horrible directions. Long boring non-scenes. Bad special effects. It's hilarious for about two minutes as it smacks your face all at once. Then it's intermittently funny as new levels of awfulness occurs. This is an incredibly bad movie. It's a student film at best. The bad sound design gets annoying. The squawking mixed with planes on bombing runs is as terrible as it gets. I'm comfortable giving this movie one star. The laughs are not generated deliberately. I'm laughing at how bad this is. I do want to give this a pity point. I can't. I can't. One point for the effort. These people tried. They're not good but they tried.

Don't be fooled by the rating. You have to watch "Birdemic" at some point.

This movies outshines "Troll 2" in every respect. It puts "Plan 9 From Outer Space" and "The Room" to shame. Imagine a movie that would be created solely to give film students a paper topic on how NOT to make movies. Every conceivable error has been made in making "Birdemic." At first, you simply won't be able to believe that the film is not a spoof. But if you read about the film and about Nguyen, and if you take a few moments to watch the additional material on the DVD, you will soon agree that this was just a misguided effort on the entire production team's part.

The sound is the most outstanding example of sheer incompetence. The director clearly understood what Foley is, since the gunshots have all been added post-production, but I guess they just didn't have the time or money to dub the vast majority of the film after shooting. And it needs it. Badly.

The acting is uniformly terrible. Not bad. Terrible. Alan Bragh doesn't even rise to the level of fourth grade pageants. Whitney Moore is cute as a button and is aided by a bit of camel-toe in at least one scene, but she's the best of a poor lot. All the supporting cast is "give your financial backers a small part" bad.

If you want to explain blocking, editing, framing, sound markers, continuity, reverse shots, and other film terms to your friends, this is the film to use. None of it is done correctly.

While the CGI (and I use the term in only the broadest sense) birds are hilarious, my favorite scene is the "retirement" scene. I think that the word "retirement" is used six times in just three lines. Watch for it. It's hard to miss.

BUT...it's strangely watchable. In contrast to many bad movies, it's not boring. Consider it a train wreck that you simply can't tear your eyes from. Even the boring scenes (and there really aren't that many) have some aspect (poor sound, hilariously unrealistic dialogue, odd things going on in the background) that fascinate. You'll be giggling and poking your elbow into the side of the person beside you.

So, go rent it. Really. You won't regret it.