Birdemic 2: The Resurrection

Let me start by saying, I am a huge fan of the original Birdemic. I've seen a lot of bad movies. Battlefield Earth is pretty bad. The Room is pretty bad. Manos, The Hands of Fate is pretty bad. Birdemic trumps them all.

And now we have a sequel. Believe me, I was excited to see this. So very very excited, which no one I know understands. But whatever, I know what I like and I like crap. Unfortunately, this movie does not deliver. I'm sorry, but there it is. The major problem you've got here is that this movie is trying way to hard to be as terrible as the first one, and that effort completely ruins it.

It's like William Hung on American Idol. You just can't believe it and are mesmerized by how awful it is. But then he just keeps doing the same thing over and over, milking it for fame and money once he realizes people like that he's terrible. Yes, I'm comparing this movie to William Hung. And yes, like poor Will this sequel has hit the point where it goes from being amusing to just being annoying.

Birdemic failed in essentially every way a movie could fail. The acting was horrible, the camera work dismal, the script was ridiculous, the sound work utterly terrible. I could run out of synonyms for 'bad' just trying to describe the first movie. And that, friends, is what made it great. Here you have a work of art lovingly created by someone and thrust out into the world, and you just cannot believe anyone could create something so awful.

Now imagine that experience, but now it's completely obvious they were trying to make something that awful on purpose. The magic is gone. Birdemic 2 is not so much a sequel, as it is the EXACT same movie but with better sound and camera work. The plot is the same. There are many scenes that are EXACT recreations of scenes in the first movie. In short the movie is, quite obviously, trying to pander to fans of the first movie's unintentional success. It's like watching someone absolutely terrible on American Idol, but then realizing that they're just trying to be terrible on purpose to get attention. It's not the same. The magic is gone.

And, to be honest, decent camera work and sound kind of kills the hilarity. Plus I like Whitney Moore better with long hair...

"Birdemic" is a notoriously bad film that is currently #8 on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Surprisingly, the same filmmaker decided on a sequel, as apparently he decided to bring us more of the same because there is an odd cult-like following for this bad film. "Birdemic 2" is currently #34 on the list....so obviously James Nguyen didn't learn much from his previous outing.

The plot, for what it matters, is about a couple of guys who are going to make a film. However, during shooting, a bunch of ridiculously unreal looking CGI birds start ripping everyone apart. The 'birds' are about as scary as a sock puppet bird and are sad to look at because of the 1990-quality CGI. Additionally, the acting, direction, editing and, especially sound quality, are just awful. However, the director has fun with it this time...tossing in some obviously gratuitous boobs, an almost funny cameo by a couple of tree-huggers, zombies, global warming and inserting an actor playing himself into the film as a guy planning on using this bird attack as inspiration for an upcoming film. So, while everything about the film is bad, at least the movie never takes itself seriously and appears to be a deliberate attempt to cash in on its being a bad film! Strangely enjoyable for bad film buffs but crap through and through.

Retrieve

This movie was poorly thought out, badly executed, and terribly acted. The cast was bored, the crew was incompetent and they recycled the plot of and characters (including bridge scientist and Tree Hugger) which I guess is green...

Having said that, the 'special' effects are less 'special' than the original. The CGI birds occasionally interact with the world around them and are not fixed to the spastic camera. Also the driving scene has been replaced with a somewhat shorter swagger walk scene.

This is not a movie to watch sober, or alone. I spent so much time correcting my typos. This movie is still not as bad as Actium Maximus: Alien Dinosaur Wars.

The existence of Actium Maximus is the one reason this movie got 2/10... We have seen rock bottom and this is not it.

The first "Birdemic" movie was horrible, and while "Birdemic 2: The Resurrection" definitely had a major step up in production value, editing and sound, then it was still a complete waste of time.

Much similar to the first movie, the storyline is laughable and unfathomably stupid. Prehistoric vultures and eagles emerge from tar pits in Hollywood and start a murderous killing spree.

Right, well that was basically the storyline, nothing impressive here, and noting believable.

But wait, it gets better. The birds were equally horribly animated as in the previous movie, giving the audience a laugh at how awful the CGI is, and not being even remotely believable for one second. And while we are on the birds, then I was impressed with how they exploded in a red mist when they were shot by guns, but also how they never left behind any dead bird bodies as they died, and most impressively the fact that they could sound like diving airplanes and explode in a horribly CGI animated column of fire when the birds struck a solid surface.

The people in the movie were definitely using proper Hollywood guns, because they never reloaded their guns and apparently had infinite amounts of bullets in the magazines. It was just so bad to witness.

But it wasn't just all birds in the movie, no... There was also a complete and utterly horribly animated jellyfish that was attacking a pair of kicking legs, that was supposed to be underwater. I use the word "supposed" here, because that scene was so fake in every aspect that my eyes almost started to bleed. And to top it off, there were these laughable surfacing air bubbles sounds. Not even a dead person would be fooled into thinking that it was for a second underwater.

And as if badly animated jellyfish wasn't enough, then there suddenly were zombies in the movie as well. Are you kidding me? Zombies? And they were in the movie for about less than 5 minutes.

I didn't know that dead people still breathed, but I was proved wrong. Pay attention to a guy in dark clothes who dies on a street somewhere around the middle of the movie; during a close up on him you can clearly see the chest heaving as he breathes.

If you have had the misfortune of suffering through the first "Birdemic" movie, then you are in for the same kind of wooden acting, horrible script and equally poorly executed dialogue in "Birdemic 2: The Resurrection". And not even the actors and actresses believed they were being attacked by these poorly animated birds.

I am at least giving the movie a thumbs up for the major step up in the editing, sound and production value in general, but it didn't add anything to increase the enjoyment of this movie. As such, "Birdemic 2: The Resurrection" scores a mere 1 out of 10 stars, just as the previous movie.

I am a HUGE fan of the first Birdemic. It changed me. Never had I seen such an honestly sincere attempt at film go so hilariously wrong. I recommend it to anyone who loves so-bad-it's-good movies, it's so awesome.

Birdemic 2 isn't the perfect sequel to Birdemic, but it's still pretty damn entertaining. Rest assured that the sincerity of the first movie is still there, as is James Nguyen's heavy-handed touch (the main character, now a Hollywood movie director, is still a placeholder for Nguyen himself). The dialogue is just as insane (all the clumsy writing trying to explain what happened since the first Birdemic was definitely my favorite thing in this film). The graphics are still so awful they leave you clutching your sides. And characters are introduced and then immediately forgotten about, just like in the first movie. The magic is still there.

In fact, many of the elements of the first Birdemic have been reproduced in the sequel. Indeed, the story follows much the same arc as the first, with events occurring in the same order. I get the strong sense that Nguyen saw this as an opportunity not just to tell a new Birdemic story, but to essentially remake Birdemic; to do it the way he would have done it if he had had money and a crew the first time around. So some might look at this as a cheap attempt to just copy the first movie to capitalize on its success. And perhaps that is what happened.

But I'm going to give Nguyen the benefit of the doubt, because he does add a lot of new elements to this movie, and this is where Birdemic 2 really shines. I don't want to spoil anything, but the new things he throws in are insane and absolutely hilarious. In fact, strangely enough, the bird scenes were my least favorite part of this movie (and they were my favorite in the first) because they started to get rather repetitive. Fortunately, there is enough wackiness going on that it doesn't bog down the movie too badly.

So no, I wouldn't say it's the perfect sequel to Birdemic. But it's pretty damn awesome. The heart is still there, and the clumsy tie-ins to the first and the new stuff makes it totally worth the money I paid for an online copy. This is definitely a movie I'm going to watch a hundred times over, just like the first Birdemic. Like I said, it feels like Nguyen tried essentially to remake Birdemic but bigger and better this time. I'm not sure if you need to have seen the first Birdemic to really enjoy this, but there's a lot of silly tie-ins which you can only appreciate if you've seen the first, so I'd recommend it.