Directed by: James Nguyen
Written by: James Nguyen
Starring: Alan Bagh, Whitney Moore, Tippi Hedren
Birdemic is a whole other kind of terrible film compared to The Last Airbender; not some inexplicably overpriced piece of garbage, Birdemic is close to the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of entirely terrible low-budget indie films. Made for less than $10,000. by bad filmmakers using poor equipment, Birdemic is literally phenomenally bad; the film has gained a cult following similar to The Room (2003).
Birdemic is so poorly made; there isn't a single scene that doesn't have something terribly wrong with it, from start to finish. The filmmakers failed to do basic sound editing, with no background noise removed; levels change between shots, so everything can be super noisy as one character speaks, and then dead quiet as another character speaks. With sound in mind, the music is dreadful too; the filmmakers seemingly only had about three different tracks to work with, and they just get repeated over and over, while being completely out of sync with the attempted tone of the film. The camera work is terrible, with random dutch angles and often awkward character placement on-screen, with movement that suggests the camera was run by a scared little child who never knew when to move the camera, so he just pushed it around at random times. The film editing is as bad as the sound editing; cuts happen seemingly with no purpose other than a character's line has finished, so we get a lot of strange moments where the camera will be looking at two characters talking, before the film cuts to a slightly closer shot of the same two characters, allowing for the other character to say their line. It really seems as if the director thought that he could only shoot one line of dialogue at a time. The acting is positively atrocious; I spoke last week about how Jackson Rathbone seemed stiff and unnatural, well compared to the actors here Rathbone looks like Marlon Brando. People just speak out loud here, they don't really talk to each other; this isn't helped by the fact that the dialgue is absolutely cringe-worthy. Just watch fifteen seconds of the film here, and you'll see everything I'm talking about.
As for the story, it's completely terrible too. If you read up on the film, you'll find out that the two films that inspired Birdemic were Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006), so what we get is a movie with a central conflict about global warming and fossil fuel usage causing birds to mutate and start attacking humans. If the idea weren't bad enough, the execution is worse. Not only does the film an hour of its roughly ninety-minute run time to actually get birds involved in some way, it happens for no reason, does nothing to change the characters in any way, and ends for no reason as well. Prior to the introduction of the Birdemic, the audience is forced to sit through a hilariously embarrassing romance between software developer Rod and and fashion model Nathalie (Bagh and Moore, respectively), as well as several ham-fisted global warming-related stories and several plugs for Yoko Ono's website ImaginePeace.com.
More on Rod though, because he's a self-insert of the director, James Nguyen, who was once a software developer like Rod. For no real reason other than seemingly that James Nguyen likes to fantasise about success he'll never achieve, much of the film's pre-Birdemic scenes are also devoted to making Rod rich. He sells a million dollars worth of... something, I'm not really sure, and soon after sells his own start-up company for ten million (the scene in which this happens contains a full minute of clapping between businessmen, by the way). Rod also gets Nathalie, a fashion model turned Victoria's Secret model, who seemingly doesn't mind Rod's complete lack of personality. This all just happens, too, none of it is earned. I suppose Nguyen may have been been going for some sort of 'build them up, break them down' style of character arc, but who am I kidding, this is Birdemic we're talking about.
Once the actual Birdemic happens, it's hilariously awful in a completely new way, as the birds themselves are some of the worst effects you'll ever see. It's incredible that once this film was made, Nguyen even bothered to promote it. After the first attack, Rod and Nathalie drive around for a while, find some kids, get attacked by birds again, drive around for a while, find Nathalie's dead friend, get attacked by birds again, find a mountain man by a creek and talk about environmental safety for a bit, leave because they hear a mountain lion, meet a scientist who preaches about man's wrongdoings to the environment such as fossil fuel usage and global warming, go to a beach and catch a fish, and finally watch as the birds suddenly appear before just as suddenly leaving and heading for the horizon. That's all that happens, with no rhyme or reason for it actually happening, other than the fact that James Nguyen wants to berate anyone who watches about global warming. The film's story never makes any effort to have even a hint of structure; the birds literally start attacking because of fossil fuels and leave because the movie needed to end. This film is an utter failure in every way, and the third-worst film I have ever seen in my life.
Don't just take my word for it, though; Birdemic is a famously bad film, and there are plenty of videos online showcasing how truly terrible the film is.
The Verdict: Birdemic is such a sad and feeble attempt at film that it's laughable. The film really toes the fine line between "so bad it's good" and "completely and irredeemably awful"; it's so unbelievably poorly made that it gets painful if you watch the film for too long, but at the same time the fact that the film seems geniune in its intent and not just a forcibly terrible exploitation flick makes it sort of pathetically funny. Go watch the film if you love bad film and hate yourself enough. Just watch it with friends; with friends, it's funny, on your own, it's sad and painful.
Rating: 1/10
Published February 3rd, 2017
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