Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle

"Birdemic 3 came out today, and Nguyen is already planning a fourth. But all I can think about is Evan Husney's sad portrait of a man who desperately wants to be a respected filmmaker but is so unable to let go of the movie that made him a cult hit that he sabotages himself."

This is what Ed Glaser wrote on Twitter alongside a clip of James Nguyen in a documentary from Vice, displaying his apparent inability to move on from the Birdemic phenomenon -- while leaving us confused whether he understands how deeply hilarious his movie about the attack of the killer bird GIFs truly is, or at least why this is so.

After all, the previous movie was trying to be funny on purpose. Alas, it is typical for a "so bad that it's good" filmmaker to lack the self-awareness to understand why people were laughing in the first place (just look at what happens when Tommy Wiseau, director of the legendarily inept The Room, tries to make us laugh INTENTIONALLY with The Neighbors) and sure enough, Birdemic 2 was just plain unwatchable.

Now, for some reason, Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle IS actually kinda funny.

Nguyen leans into what made the original movie so transfixingly terrible (the constantly shifting audio quality, white balance, and saturation seem all the more jarring with the improved picture quality) but isn't trying to be cheeky about it. The impression I got was that of a filmmaker who, deep down, does think this all looks really cool and that these sub-PSA "insights" about global warming and environmentalism are genuinely profound (one is reminded of bad movie legend Neil Breen, who still plays everything straight, possibly because he knows how hilarious that makes him).

But then, the movie does come with the additional (depressing) undertone generated by what we know from the aforementioned documentary: this is all Nguyen has in him. I was pondering this as I watched, but promptly forgot about all that when I heard a track by Melodysheep (composed for his sublime YouTube doc about life in the cosmos and its inevitable fate) among the stock music.

He's got taste, that James Nguyen.

Granted, I didn't like the previous two movies, yet I still opted to sit down and watch this 2022 third movie in the series, titled "Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle".

Was I expecting anything? Well, not really. I was hoping that they upped their game from the previous two abysmal movies, sure, but I wasn't harboring any expectations.

Writer and director James Nguyen delivered what had to have been the worst movie of 2022 here with "Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle". Wow, just wow.

First of all, you have to wait 56 minutes before the birds make an appearance. And let's face it, the lousy animated birds from parts I and II is what drives you to go on to watch the third movie. I certainly was for me. And 56 minutes into a movie only 83 minutes long, before you are rewarded with those horrible animated birds that explode on impact.

Up to the 56 minute marker, the movie is nothing but a slow paced infomercial of how bad a state the Earth is in, about climate crisis, global warming and how humans are destroying the Earth. I am not kidding. It was literally all that was going; watching Ryan Lord and Julia Culbert walk around various locations and delivering gut-wrenching wooden dialogue about the state of the Earth.

The acting in the movie was toe-curling awful to witness. The performances were wooden and rigid at best. With absolute zero chemistry between the leading actor Ryan Lord (playing Evan) and leading actress Julia Culbert (playing Kim), and they both delivered performances that would make a dead man wake up and go "oh really now?" And the dance scene was just atrocious; never before have I seen such awkward and rigid dancing before my eyes. Actually there wasn't a single good performance throughout the 83 minutes of runtime that this infomercial for global warming and eco crisis ran for.

The movie is a dumpster fire of grand scale. The storyline is rubbish, especially since you have to wait close to an hour before those god awful animated birds show up. Then there was the issues with the lighting and quality of the picture, which kept alternating between shadowed haze and ordinary daylight. And the sound was equally bad; loud in some scenes and barely audible in others.

Visually then "Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle" was every bit as horrible as the previous two movies. With lousy animated birds, sea eagles this time, that exploded on impact and just using the same two frames of animated birds over and over. I mean, even when people were shooting and fending off birds with various tools, there weren't even birds in the picture most of the time.

But hey, at least "Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle" is good for a laugh once past the 56 minute marker.

"Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle" from writer and director James Nguyen was bad, so very, very bad. My rating of "Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle" lands on a one out of ten stars. Without a doubt the worst movies I have stumbled upon from 2022.

Do yourself a favor and stay well clear of this one. Some of us suffered through it, so you don't have to.

I'm so ooking forward to seeing this, after coming upon its two predecessors recently.

Thanks to Amazon Prime, we'll give it a look this evening: --well, it felt like home: Birdemic's trademark opening tracking shots follow the main character sl-o-o-owly thru the credits; he spots the requisite comely blonde, and introduces himself (they're both as nerdy as their predecessors) and we're off!.......only this time the emphasis is directed toward environmental danger right away. There's no putzing around with trying to make a movie-within-a-movie; rather our hero seeks financing for a rejuvenating product.

In between, the environmental-crisis message keeps reappearing to remind us of the point of the film.

That message is fine and all, but there's absolutely no way philanthropic millionaires would appear on every corner, ready to give our hero oodles of money. Nor would young people ever, in any universe, spout dialogue like this.

But it's fun to see just how wooden the acting can be (with the lines they're given to say, I'm guessing the cast is trying to pretend they're anywhere else but in this movie) and it's a guessing game as to just how much walking around the main characters can do.

To break it up a little, an agonizingly long dance scene is included, a la 'Birdemic 2', along with the obligatory motel room hanky-panky.

Also like its predecessors, the bodies pile up all across town, in part because none of the people ever think to go indoors. But fortunately the main characters continue to be armed with an array of assault weapons and endless ammo.

In sum: in between the characters' endless walking around--encountering environmentalists everywhere they go, natch, and somehow neglecting to contact someone like the police or National Guard--the location photography is quite pretty, and you can enjoy that as you wait for the CGI fowl to finally make their appearance. Hopefully, they'll attack the offices of whoever wrote the script.

Let me start out with this...

If you liked Birdemic 1 & 2, do yourself a favor, and skip this entry. I'm dead serious. Don't bother.

You thought waiting 30mins (Birdemic 1) or 45 mins (Birdemic 2) to see the bad cg birds was bad?? Try waiting an hour in an hour and 23min long movie, and somehow, the birds look actually worse than they did in the prior two installments. Hell, Alan Bagh doesn't even show up in the movie until just after the birds. But you know what you do get to see?? The absolute worst & stiffest acting humanly possible by "paid professionals."

Once again, James Nguyen follows the same plot as he did the last two times, but somehow... worse. Each scene is some random person spewing exposition at the lead actors, sounding like they're just reading wikipedia articles held up by James off scene. Each character preaches at length in each scene, making the movie seem to last an eternity, despite being just a few minutes.

Hell, there is literally a scene where we watch the lead man watch tv for 5 minutes, with the camera panning around him & room, as he eats a sandwich. Before that, we get to watch both leads stand on a pier & watch a 5 man protest of wikipedia reading & unemotional yelling for another 5mins.

Honestly, skip this movie. Unless you're going to see it in person, with Alan & James there, in the theatre, so you can ask them "Why?"

For a movie that "tries" to be the horror version of Captain Planet and failed royally (if that wasn't a clue from the last movies). It doesn't help that not only story doesn't improve , but there acting for the third time makes tommy wiseau look like John cena.

Outside of minor changes and by minor I mean mononucleosis changes...bad weapons, bad messages of climate change, bad cgi did I forget to say bad cgi birds? Yeesh just watch the birds and throw these 3 movies in the computer trash bin Before I go I will say this: it's really hard to say anything about this when the weapons are the same damn things.