Hahahahaha! Wow, what did I just watch? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that once those ending credits start rolling in Birdemic: Shock and Terror, this is what you will be thinking. This is also assuming that you aren't driven completely insane by the experience of seeing it through to the end. So because I've managed to come out the other side of this experience with my mental faculties in tact (arguably) I've decided that I shall dedicate a blog post to reviewing it. Let the madness begin!
So Birdemic is an independent film by James Nguyen and is billed as a romantic horror film, which is rather ambitious description. The Fly was a romantic horror film and Birdemic doesn't even hint at that level of excellence. It would be like calling Playschool an opera or Jerry Springer a wildlife documentary. A more apt genre for Birdemic would be ironic cult comedy. But really it almost defies genre. The plot is straightforward enough. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, birds start attacking people in flocks and suicide bombing petrol stations, boy and girl decide to drive aimlessly until the problem goes away. Along the way they rescue some children and meet a cast of colourful characters, who each shares their experiences and explanations regarding this killer bird outbreak. If it sounds dumb and simple that's because it is. It's an extremely easy movie to follow because it focuses entirely on the present tense. The background of the characters is weak, the movie completely lacks direction and motivation and any conflicts that come about along the way are easily resolved and quickly forgotten. What's more the birds never actually feel like a threat. They can't seem to get into buildings and are easily fended off with guns and even coat-hangers. In fact in one of my favorite scenes one of the bird attempts to dive in through the windscreen and just crumples up uselessly against it on impact.
From a technical standpoint the movie fails perhaps even harder. All the cutaway shots are extremely jarring so that during conversations characters standing a foot away from each other seem to be located in different dimensions. This isn't helped at all by the acting, which is astonishingly bad. I honestly don't even understand how acting could be that bad. It's unfathomable. These people belong in a museum or a research facility. Everything is just so robotic and awkward that it makes the acting in porn look Oscar worthy. Lots of the transition and establishing shots are needless and linger on pointlessly, much like me trying to dance with girls at clubs. This is more than I can say for the musical cues, which are on several occasions stopped abruptly as if the musician had been recorded in secret and had just discovered the tape recorder in the lamp shade. And the birds! Oh dear Esther do those birds look bad. Just some horrid tangled messes of brown and red imposed uncomfortably on top of the scenery like the fat kid at school who used to sit on you and fart.
So the plot is dumb, the script is bad, the characters are bland and the production is a nightmare. But you'll probably be surprised to learn at this point that I actually really enjoyed this movie. Sure it's terrible. But it's terrible in a well-meaning and hilarious way. It's not a cynical attempt to wring money from a popular franchise or cash in on a notorious celebrity. It's not promoting evil or spreading propaganda. And it's certainly never boring. I've laughed harder, more frequently and more genuinely at this movie than so many other movie that were actually intending to be comedy. And there's actually something quite gentle and adorably well-intentioned about this movie. Writter, director and producer James Nguyen has never had any training or experience and funded this project almost entirely. The film almost plays out like a love letter to the films that inspired it, namely The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock and An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. Throughout the film there are nods to the importance of renewable energy, hybrid cars and it even hints that the aggressive nature of the birds has something to do with climate change, with birds attacking primarily at gas stations and non-green forms of transport. I found all this to be rather sweet, if completely poorly handled. So despite the fact that is an abomination of film I'd still recommend watching it. Because it's hilarious, harmless, well-meaning and strangely fascinating.
