Overview:

While many were spending Oscar night watching the mind-numbing ceremony rewarding Hollywood’s best, I was alone in my bedroom watching perhaps the single most stunningly inept piece of B-movie trash ever created.

The movie was Birdemic: Shock and Terror a movie that ceremonies like the Academy Awards were likely created to bring an end to. Luckily, for dorks like me, they have not yet succeeded.

Synopsis:

Software guru Rod (Alan Bagh) and fashion model Nathalie (Whitney Moore) have fallen in love and are about to settle down after Rod makes a mult-million dollar business transaction. Their plans to spend eternity together hit a snag, when deadly brids unleash a wave of shock and terror.

Review:

Now the obvious comparison that jumps out when hearing that plotline is Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. And while writer/director James Nguyen claims this to be a tribute to that movie, the look, writing and acting seems to indicate he and the stars drew most of their inspiration from those cheeply made Community College ads that run on late night tv, only with about half the artistic intergity.

While the budget for this movie was clearly next-to-nothing, its technical flaws are unacceptable. I’ve never seen a movie with bigger sound problems, as you can hear it fluxuate in and out the entire time.

Nguyen also seems to possess no knowledge of what constitutes a quality cut. Whether it’s obvious cuts made midsentance or scenes that linger on to the point where you start to feel uncomfortable, you’d be hard pressed to find one seamless shot in this entire movie.

As for the acting, it reaches a level of awfulness that is hard to comprehend even after viewing the film twice. Everyone is awful, but lead actor Alan Baugh is operating at a level which makes it seem as if English is, at best, his third language. To watch him walk and talk, it is truly astonishing to think this performance came from a human being. Then again this entire movie seems as if it came from another planet.

And it’s important to note all these complaints are from before the actual Birdemic, which actually takes 45 minutes to get underway. If anything positive could be said for the film from a technical standpoint, it’s that if it can make basic things like human conversation seem like backbreaking labor, a killer bird attack is surely going to be spectacular.

And by the time the shock and terror do roll around, we get this…
…yeah.

But of course this movie wouldn’t be complete without a message. What causes the bird attack? You guessed it, global warming!

And the speeches we get about the big bad environmental monster (given by a possibly homeless scientist and a hippie who lives among the trees) are ludicrous, sounding like they were written by a brilliant right wing satarist who wanted to make everyone who ever even considered practiceing environmentalism look fucking crazy.

For instance, the scientist scoulds the human race for its dependance on fossil fuels, and wonders why we can’t be more like astronauts. Because God knows that’s an industry that scoffs at the idea of burning fuel.

Now normally when watching a movie like this, I like to assume the people making it are playing it strait, because it seems more fun to watch that way. And while I don’t want to think Nguyen tanked this movie, it truly is hard to believe anyone could do this on accident.

The special effects are understandable, but no one who’s ever seen a movie or so much as had one conversation in their lives should have been able to handle the non-action scenes in a way that they at least appear to be occurring on Earth.

The best movie to compare this to in terms of quality is Tommy Wiseau’s masterpiece The Room and in an odd way, it’s more enjoyable to watch in that it tries to do more with less (Wiseau’s jilted lover movie cost $7 million, while Birdemic appears to have been shot on video cameras which went out of stock in the 80’s).

Final Words:

If I were to list everything wrong with this movie in detail, it would be 5,000 words long (Where did the bird’s acid shooting ability come from and why did they only utalize it once? With the Birdemic insanely out of hand, why are so many people continuing to drive into town? With all the shock and terror they’ve encountered, why would these idiots stop and have a fucking picnic? But I digress).

Everything is wrong. Everything. And I enjoyed every minute of it. If loving a movie where a woman is fatally attacked by a bird as she takes a dump outdoors in wrong, being right is highly overrated.

If you are someone who takes more pleasure in making fun of bad movie than trying to dissect thought provoking ones (ie, if you’re an idiot), this movie is an insanely good time. And if you don’t see it in time for the fall release of Birdemic II: The Resurrection 3D you’re not going to have a clue as to what the entire cinematic community is buzzing about.

Final Score: 9.7/10