IMDB Bottom 100: Number 6 - Birdemic

Number 6: Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

I’ve noted before, I didn’t go into this 100 worst thing entirely blind, I have seen a lot of these films before.

Some I’ve seen many times. Many, many times. Birdemic is one such film. It’s similar to whenever I watch Superman IV, I know what I’m watching is awful but there’s always something new I hadn’t noticed before that makes me enjoy it more.

I don’t feel like I even need to watch it again to do a review of it. I can describe the whole intro right up to the opening line of dialogue. In fact I’ll do just that:

Opening with a POV shot inside a moving car with an awful music loop playing over the top. Seriously, it’s just two bars repeating over and over. Windows Movie Maker credits appear giving us the main players but also ‘Supporting Casts’ because one supporting cast just isn’t enough. Watching this car drive slowly along the road for four minutes but feels three times as long. Eventually our, for lack of a better word, ‘hero’ carefully parks his car (if there is one message to take from this film its park safely because there is a lot of car parking coming up). Rod slowly walks from his car in a way that you would not expect any person to walk in, he looks so unnatural. Eventually he makes it to the restaurant where a terminator is disguised as a waitress. It’s the only explanation I have for the ridiculous way the first line is delivered. You would need to hear it to fully appreciate it, its’ only one word ‘Hi!’ but if you assume multiple takes are done for each shot, like a proper film-maker would, you have to conclude that was the best take. So God only knows how bad the others were.

One new thing I did notice when re-watching was a credit for Tippi Hedren, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds which Birdemic is a loose remake of. Though writer and director James Nguyen clearly didn’t take note of how Hitchcock built suspense in his films. But seriously Hedren is on screen for a second on a TV in a motel room. I do like the cheekiness of it.

Since Nguyen tried and failed to get Birdemic shown at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, driving a truck with the film’s title emblazoned on the side, it has picked up quite the cult following. If you go on You Tube and type in ‘Birdemic’ hundreds of videos reviews will appear, from little nobodies in their basements to big million plus subscriber channels.

The criticisms always note the same things: the awful acting; Rod being the worlds’ worst salesman; Nathalie apparently being a Victoria’s Secret model but has all her photo sessions in a one-hour photo shop; the excessive parking; the ham fisted environmental message; the stupid song in the nightclub (‘Just hanging out, hanging out, with the family, Yeah!’); it being 47minutes before we even see anything with wings; the kamikaze exploding birds with plane sound effects; fighting off birds with coat-hangers (the motel wouldn’t let them take out the shower rails); the children who immediately forget the brutal murders of their parents; the movie occasionally taking a break to bring you an environmental lecture on global warming and Spruce Bark Beetles; fishing apparently requiring no hooks or bait.

That’s a small sample that barely skims the surface. The one thread that runs through all reviews though is: this is the best bad movie ever! And it really is. Everything about it is wrong. Some claim that Birdemic is intentionally bad. I disagree, to have deliberately made a film as bad as this would have required far too much thought and effort.

The problem with there being all this material available makes it hard to find anything new or original to say about it. So rather than try and sum up the film any more, lets’ see what happened to the principal casts since then:

Alan Bagh – Rod – By all accounts a really nice guy, Birdemic was his first film role. Since then he’s kept himself busy with a number of straight-to-dvd releases and even had a role as an extra in Parks and Recreation. When website Rifftrax took their show on the road and done a live riff of Birdemic, Bagh attended as a special guest.

Whitney Moore – Nathalie – auditioned for her role in a car park and had to take over as make-up artist on the film after the previous two had quit. How appropriately chaotic. She’s kept herself busy since then, mostly in independent low-budget movies even if a lot of her roles do seem to be of the ‘woman in diner’ variety. There’s probably not many actresses who can list ‘Batman’ on their CV though.

Damian Carter – Nightclub singer – he of ‘Hanging out with the Family’ fame (‘gonna have ourselves a parrrrr-ty!’). Despite appearances, he is a proper musician, has performed in venues all over America and released an album. In a 2013 interview he said he had a lot of fun with Birdemic and was happy it gave him a chance to showcase his music. It’s still a weird song though.

James Nguyen – the Vietnamese born writer, director and producer. A former IT Software salesman, which is surprising given how little his films seem to understand the industry (nb. Giving away a 50% discount is never a good deal, there is such a thing as ‘profit margins’ you know). He’s never had any formal training in filmmaking, which explains a lot, but founded Moviehead Pictures in 2001. The people he casts in his films typically have little movie experience themselves. The blind leading the blind. Though he's so out there I think he might secretly be a genius.

One day, I hope for peace between man and birds too...

They would all be re-united though, one more time…

Bad Movie Appreciation Society, #2: Birdemic

This film is amazing. No mere words can explain how brilliantly bad this movie is but I shall endeavour to try. Think of Ed Wood at his worst, multiply the badness by a 1000 and you're still a long way off.

Birdemic (or Birdemic: Shock and Terror to give its full title) is a homage to Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds with a heavy environmental message. It was made in 2010 and is directed by James Nguyen. 

Now I have to be fair to Nguyen here, Birdemic was made for next to nothing in film terms (about $10,000) and it does show in the special effects. Nguyen put a lot of effort into making it and promoted the film at the Cannes festival himself.

Bad special effects can be forgiven but there are other things to making a film less dependent on money. Does the story make sense? Does the dialogue flow? Is that really the best actor you could get? Do you even need this character? Or that scene?

At some point or other in the movie, Birdemic fails on all these things.

So, the story such that it is. For the first half hour or so, nothing of note happens. To go back to The Birds, Hitchcock uses the first part of the film to ratchet up the tension, Birdemic wastes it on banality.

We meet a dull software salesman called Rod who meets a girl he used to go to school with (Nathalie) who is now a Victoria's Secret model but still does all her photo shoots at the one-hour photo store.

Then he buys some solar panels for his house and we get a full explanation on what solar panels do (if there's anyone left in the world who doesn't know).

Rod's software company then makes a big money deal. Obviously this means all the employees will now leave that company and it will cease to trade (seriously, that is what happens). So Rod sets up his own solar panel business and makes big deals with his highly persuasive one-slide powerpoint presentations.

Rod, Nathalie and some friends go watch the movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Rod's friend, who was previously of the Jeremy Clarkson school of motoring announces he is now getting a hybrid (do you think there's some sort of theme emerging here?).

Rod and Nathalie then go to a Vietnamese restaurant and are then awkwardly dancing to a rather bizarre song.

Here are some of the lyrics:

A cool summer breeze, making me feel at ease
The barbeque is broilin’ and Uncle Phil is scorin’
Big Momma’s in the kitchen and everybody wishin’
That she’s fixin’ they favorite dish

Just hanging out, hanging out

Hanging out with my family, going to have a paaaaarty

Then out of nowhere, the birds attack. Until this moment you’d probably forgot the name of this movie was Birdemic, so few are the birds you’ve seen in this film.

From here on out you are treated to some of the worst CGI birds you’ve ever seen. Oh, and they make sounds like howlitzers and explode on impact. And spit acid, as birds do.

Our heroes fight off this avian menace with coathangers and go on a road trip to where I’m not exactly sure. Along the way they pick up a couple of children and become surrogate parents. They meet a guy who’s job seems to be to watch a pond and no invasion of killer birds is going to get in the way of that but he still has time to give a lecture on global warming.

They meet a guy who lives in the forest. He explains to them how global warming is raising the number of Spruce Bark Beetles that are killing all our trees (damn them!) and a forest fire spontaneously bursts out.

They end up on a beach where Rod discovers fishermen have been wasting their time for years using bait to catch fish, all you need is the rod. The evil birds then show up but this time are chased away by ‘good’ birds whose existence was hitherto not mentioned.

Rod, Nathalie and their new adopted kids then watch as the birds fly away out to sea. For a long time. A really long time.

Let’s get technical. The actors are abysmal, probably just dragged in off the street as Nguyen went along. The script is awful. Having an environmental message is all well and good but delivering it in such a ham-fisted manner with characters shoe-horned in to give overlong lectures is not the way to go about it.

Even going to basics such as camera angle and framing are done poorly. Background music is too loud, drowning out the character dialogue (though arguably that’s a good thing).

I want to give this balance, and point out something good about Birdemic but there isn’t anything. It’s just bad, bad, bad.

Reading it through you may be under the impression I don’t like Birdemic but that couldn’t be further from the truth. This level of ineptitude is a marvel to behold. It’s awesome in its awfulness.

And apparently, there’s a Birdemic 2…

When Does a Bad Movie Become Good?

I recently watched the documentary, Best Worst Movie and frankly, it’s bizarre when you think about it.

The documentary centres around the 1992 film Troll 2, widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. Twenty years on, the film has gained a massive cult following and is playing in packed out cinemas across America. And it’s spreading, Troll 2 is gaining a following across Europe as well.

The story is ridiculous, the actors are terrible, the dialogue is worse, direction is non-existent and there are no trolls to be seen. Yet people love it? Why? Why are people lapping up this rubbish?

It makes no sense. If you were asked to choose between watching a good movie and a bad movie, you’d choose the good movie wouldn’t you? Yet no, these people are choosing to watch Troll 2 instead. In the time it takes to watch Troll 2 you could have watched Citizen Kane, widely regarded as one of the best films ever made.*

The charm of Troll 2 seems to stem from the fact those involved didn’t seem aware they were making a bad film. It falls into that old cliché of being ‘so bad it’s good.’ But when does that occur exactly in the film making process? The Twilight films for example, will never have to worry about falling into this category.

To become ‘so bad its good’ a movie has to fail on every level. The run-of-the-mill bad movie will usually get at least some elements of the film right. The success of a film is built on lots of different facets such as the acting, casting, dialogue, direction, editing, sound, music, etc.  The SBIG movie will mess up on almost if not all of them.

But again for it to really succeed (or indeed, fail) it needs to appear that those involved don’t know the film is terrible. Ed Wood, director of Plan 9 from Outer Space, was said by those around him to be unaware how bad a director he was, so consumed was he in his ‘art’.

It’s tempting to think this comes down to an issue of budget as many films proclaimed as being SBIG are typically low budget. There may be some truth to this but on the flip side this argument ignores the many good films made on small budgets throughout cinema’s history. Kevin Smith’s first (and best) film Clerks was made for $30,000 (largely self-funded) with a cast of unknown local actors. This only equates to about an eighth of the budget given to Troll 2. It’s perhaps ironic that it was when Kevin Smith was given a budget to work with and able to cast well-known actors in his films it all started to go a bit pear-shaped (I’m looking at you Affleck).

There is a growing market for bad movies. When making Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in the 90’s, a TV programme based around the idea of making fun of bad movies, the producers would be inundated with requests from directors to show their films as they knew an appearance would increase their sales.

In modern times, Asylum pictures lead the way in bad movie releases with titles such as Megashark vs Giant Octopus and Sharknado. This trend is even shifting over to mainstream Hollywood with films built around ludicrous premises (Snakes on a Plane anyone?).

But where these films fall down for me is in that we’re supposed to think these films are bad, everything is played with a knowing wink and a smile. They are not true SBIG movies. The SBIG movie does not know how awful it is.

There is a theory that some film makers have deliberately tried to make their films as bad as possible to achieve SBIG status. A good analogy for this would be The Producer’s, where they deliberately try to make the worst musical ever but inadvertently become the biggest hit on Broadway.

Birdemic is a film often cited as an example of this. I don’t buy it. If you were to ever watch Birdemic (there are clips on youtube), you would realise that to have deliberately made a film as bad as this would have taken a lot of effort. And if you are going to put that much effort in then you might as well try and make a good movie.

I don’t believe anyone sets out to make a bad movie but through factors such as bad stories, bad actors and just sheer bloody incompetence they do it. And I, and many others, love them for it.

*you may have worked out, I spend a lot of time watching bad movies when I could be watching Citizen Kane. Yet I’ve never seen Troll 2.