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34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How do you rate this?, February 23, 2011
It is difficult if not impossible to rate a movie like this. On a pure movie-making standpoint this movie achieves negative stars, so many negative stars. It has to. Otherwise giving it even one star would create a wickedly skewed curve in all of movie-creation that makes the worst of the very worst movies you have ever seen Five-Star movies. Yes. This movie is so terrible that it makes EVERY MOVIE EVER MADE a five-star movie. The Room, through Plan Nine, up to Inception on through Citizen Cane and Casablanca. Every. One. Of them. Now five-star movies.
The plot? What plot? The text message you just got from your 12-year-old child composed in net-speak has more of a plot than this thing. Basically we have a hero, a heroine, some secondary characters and stuff happening and, oh yeah, some eagles have achieved single-positional, non propulsive, flight and are being generally annoying and sort-of lethal to the population of Somewhere, California. Our heroes are some lame ad-guy who is a millionaire but takes his love interests on dates in the locally-owned Mexican restaurants our heroine is a pretty young model talent who gets her pictures taken in the strip-mall photo shop and has, somehow, become the cover model for direct-mail catalogs for Victoria's Secret. The two meet completely by chance and creepy stalker-like behavior and are so turned-off by life they decide to go out on a couple of dates before rubbing uglies in an hourly-rate motel by the interstate. Remember, our lead male recently became a millionaire from business dealings and our lead female is a cover model for a major lingerie chain, it's at about this point the birds of the world turn into "CGI" sprites and begin "attacking" people at random. And by "attack" I mean they hover around them, squawk like seagulls and are capable of expelling an acidic venom although they do this only once. Random things happen, random vehicles pull in and out of parking places and then things just stop. It makes "The Happening" look well thought-out and executed.
The audio is very jumpy (movie's fault not the disc's) as in one shot the actor's voice is mostly audible and in the next shot the actor's voice is drowned out by background noise, the whole movie was also apparently shot on that VHS Camcorder that's been hiding in your parent's attic for the last 15 years, the "CGI" is done on the 400MHz computer sitting next to it and somehow looks less like a bird than the sprites in "Duck Hunt" did on the Nintendo, heck, the animals on your Farmville plot look more realistic. Dialogue is muddied by actors who weren't taught to annunciate and by a production so broke apparently no second takes occurred causing much of the dialogue to seem like the final take of a scene was also the dress rehearsal for the scene.
So, you may be wondering why I find it hard to rate this movie it's obviously terrible.
Well.... It's so terrible you simply have to see it. It'll shock and confuse you on how this production was financed, produced and distributed. Money has been invested in this thing. And it's absolutely terrible. You have to see it to believe it, do it with some friends, some drinks and some coat hangers (you'll find out). So on a movie level it's no-stars. On an entertainment value? Five stars. Seriously, you'll laugh at how bad this movie is and remember making a better movie for your 9th-Grade Mass Media class.
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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
So awful, and yet so wonderful in its awfulness., May 12, 2010
This review is from: BIRDEMIC - Shock and Terror (DVD)
Birdemic: Shock and Terror (James Nguyen, 2008)
I have seen many, many bad movies over the years. Many. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. And of those, there are a select few that are so indomitably awful that they transcend bad and achieve a sort of awful greatness, a train wreck effect that compels you to watch the movie over and over again, trying to make sense of it. Night of the Lepus. Beware! The Blob!. Shriek of the Mutilated. I'm sure you can come up with another dozen of your favorites. Add to that list the second half of Birdemic: Shock and Terror. I mean, when people rush into your convenience store and scream "the eagles killed my friends!", and you've been hearing reports about killer eagles on the radio all day, wouldn't you think your first reaction would be to go to the front door and remove the prop holding it open? But no, folks. That's the kind of genius that was involved in putting this mess together.
The first half of this abyss of stupidity is actually a romance, not a horror flick. Rod (Alan Bagh in, thankfully, his only screen role) is a software salesman who runs into a high school classmate, Nathalie (Student of Virginity's Whitney Moore), who's become a fashion model, by chance in a diner. After a painfully awkward meeting scene that encompasses everything one shouldn't do in a meeting scene, they begin dating, etc., etc. There are a couple of foreshadowing moments that something will go wrong (and as soon as you hit the first one, you'll know you're trapped in yet another horrendous ecohorror movie with a MESSAGE), but for the most part, it's played as a straight drama/romance. Fifty minutes into the movie, however, it switches direction into ecohorror. The opening piece of this half of the movie is so badly done that I defy anyone to see it without laughing in near-hysterical disbelief. It is at this point that the movie transcends is horrible beginnings and becomes worthy of sticking on your short shelf of movies so truly awful that you can't help but love them. I've seen CGI this bad in a handful of Sci-Fi Channel Original Movies, but I've never seen any worse. The acting is horrible (as it was in the first half), but more notably, the actions taken by the characters are invariably idiotic. (The not-closing-the-door thing in the opening paragraph? Tip of the iceberg, baby.) And when you get to the final scene, please resist the urge to throw things at the television. You don't want to break your screen.
Like all movies that find themselves on the list, it lacks any redeeming qualities whatsoever. If you are not appreciative of cheesy movies, do yourself a favor and stay far, far away from this one. If, however, you can appreciate the demented (sub-mental?) genius involved in the crafting of such braindead classics as Kingdom of the Spiders, then this is one you need to see. Stick it out through the first forty-five minutes, though, and you will be amply rewarded. ½
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Ed Wood, Jr., move over, February 25, 2011
This film might quite possibly be the ne plus ultra of bad filmmaking, Ed Wood, Jr. notwithstanding. And I almost missed it. The first scene, a thoroughly quotidian scene in which the film's dashing young hero enters a restaurant and is shown to a booth, was so bad that I nearly stopped the movie after that single minute. But something, perhaps that apparently inborn trait that draws us, like moths to bug zappers, to the grotesque in life--traffic accidents, open wounds, Lindsay Lohan--or maybe just the laziness that comes with a Y chromosome and keeps me from extending the energy to push the remote, made me keep watching. And to think what I would have missed!
Birdemic is astonishingly inept. The coverage, for instance, during any of the conversations in the film is embarrassingly bad with the result that there are unnatural pauses interspersed throughout any conversation (the flaw that nearly prevented me from watching the film). Or perhaps it's the editing that truly sucks. A few shots should have ended long before they actually did. At any rate, the film moves along ineptly for a good 15 or 20 minutes until it achieves its true glory, something hinted at in a few scenes but never fully realized until the middle of the film. I'm talking about the special effects.
There is a scene early in the film in which the aforementioned dashing hero and the fetching heroine are on a date. Those who have seen the date montage for Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley from, I think, the first Naked Gun film will understand the true beauty of this scene. The young soon-to-be lovers pause to admire three birds hovering near a tree. The problem is that the birds look less real than the atomic octopus sans motor in Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster. Technology has given us amazing CGI, but true auteurs, like James Nguyen, whose mess Birdemic is, have an ineptitude that transcends the march of progress. So we find out when the birds attack.
For those who are not familiar with avian martial strategy, it is, I gather much the same the world over. The birds make sounds like WWII airplanes and then dive bomb their targets. Upon reaching these targets, they explode. Bird boom pow. At this point in the film, I was a bit confused. I had not known that birds explode, but later, a scientist appears a la War Games's Falken (albeit without the fun video) and explains that global warming is to blame and that, apparently, one of the well-known effects of the death of krill in the oceans is exploding birds. I may have missed some of the technical points of this tendentious character's bloviating, but I think I got the gist.
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