Birdemic: Shock and Terror

When a movie starts with music that grinds your ears, standard movie- maker font, 10 minutes of random shots from the valleys of Hollywood and an unknown B-movie director that claims he's the "master of romantic thrillers", you know you're in for one hell of a ride.

I don't really know if this movie is a joke or not, if they actually went in full force with the intention of actually making a great film with their 10.000 dollar budget, clearly they did not. When the actual film starts, the camera is so horrid I thought the cameraman was drunk, or if I was unwillingly intoxicated. Anyways, I had to check my earphones after a couple of minutes, because the sound suddenly stopped and popped up at random, looks like the sound-mixer of this movie probably is deaf or some sort of modern day Hellen Keller.

Let's say something about the acting.. if there is any. I felt my heart wrenching when the protagonist started reading his lines, his act is already so wooden after two minutes of screen-time he'd fit right in the Ents from the "Lord of the Rings"-trilogy. When an actor can't even walk straight without showing signs of having something rectangular shoved up his rectum, there's something wrong.

After about 45 minutes of clapping (yes, see it for yourself), a love story that makes the Twilight-saga seem like "The Notebook" and "Titanic" combined, dialouges that are from another planet and all-in- all all I'm thinking: Is this movie the "Shock and Terror" the sub-title proclamates? 'Cause I haven't seen a f*cking bird yet!!

When the birds arrive.. No, I don't even care to write about it.. I feel ashamed of myself. I feel like laying down in the shower with my clothes on and cry while the cold water is running on full.

This movie basically makes Tommy Wiseau's "The Room" seem like the new "Schindler's List". Enough said.

This is one of my favorite movies of all time. I do not mean that it is a good movie, as it is one of the worst movies ever made. However, the magnitude of this movie's failure makes it a truly original experience. Birdemic Shock and Terror puts your mind in a place between awe and crying from laughter. No other movie, even ones with comparable ratings , can compare to this movie. This movie pulls off awful in such a way that blows your mind. After you watch this movie, you will be left speechless for almost a 1/2 hour just trying to comprehend what you just watched. It is truly a one-of-a-kind experience that I feel everyone should have.

Where does one start? How can you mentally digest something like Birdemic? I am still in shock. I have seen some shitty movies in my time. But Birdemic, friends and neighbors, is the worst movie in the history of film-making, on this planet or in any other dimension for that matter. It is bad, OMG, right off the scale on the shitometer. The acting? Poor Alan Bagh, is he a living, walking wooden plank? Special effects? I swear, the birds are cardboard cutouts dangling from strings. For some reason, they explode when they hit something. Why? Why is that? Can't somebody explain, for freak's sake?

Everything stinks so very gaggingly. A rhesus monkey with a camcorder poking out of its arse would do better. Beware, my friends, beware of this abomination that is Birdemic.

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.

There are no words that come to mind after seeing this film. Travesty, horrific, absurd, ridiculous, and mind-numbingly stupid all come to mind but none of 'em quite describe just how awful this "film" really is. To see where everyone went wrong, let's break it down!

1. It takes 45 minutes until the actual plot begins to develop. By this time, the majority of viewers have fallen asleep or have taken their own lives.

2. The actor who plays Rod, Alan Bagh. He makes me miss Nicholas Cage. NO NOT THE BEES!!! AHHHH!!!

3. The birds. What do they do exactly? Nothing. The birds come down and fly directly in front of the victims face. Then they die for reasons only criminally insane director James Nguyen knows. God help us.

4. Read my parental advisory

5. "Hey I thought I told you to stand back. These birds are contaminated"

6. What is wrong with Rod's friend? And why can't he get a good looking girlfriend?

7. The dialogue. It's like watching a poorly translated foreign film. "I like you and because you are pretty to me" "I thank you this words they make me happy" "Yaaaaaayyy..."

8. This quote: "Why would birds do something like that? Why would they just attack" "......I don't know"

-------The good?

1. Thank god for Whitney Moore in lingerie. The only believable thing about this movie was that she got a job at Victoria's Secret.

And that's my review. Go see it. I guarantee you will never see a worse film.