Customer Reviews

BIRDEMIC - Shock and Terror

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

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.

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

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.

Words alone won't do Birdemic justice. This isn't a movie, it's an experience. Like having your brain fried on LSD, spritzed with lemon juice and tossed into the grand canyon.

Plan 9 From Outer Space? The Room? Rank amateurs compared to the brilliance of James Nguyen. This movie has everything: Exploding birds, romantic thrills, mountain lions and the most mind-blowing anti-acting you'll ever witness.

Grab a bottle of vodka and a coat hangar, pop in this movie with a bunch of friends and prepare for the greatest night of your life.

Manos, the Hands of Fate. Showgirls. Troll 2. The Room. And now we have "Birdemic."

Nothing I say about this movie really matters. It has joined the small but notorious ranks of movies that are so utterly horrible, they become classic comedies -- it's a Z-grade "romantic thriller" (neither romantic nor thrilling) which tells us that A) Al Gore is God and B) global warming causes birds to become explosive kamikaze death machines that vomit acid.

The perfectly-named Rod (Alan Bagh) is a software programmer living in.... a town somewhere, where he makes a fortune in a software deal, and decides to make his own environmentally-friendly company. He also romances a model named Nathalie (Whitney Moore); they dance, talk with her boring mom, talk about stuff, look at dead birds, and eventually have sex at a motel.

Yeah, you're probably wondering where the explosive birds are. Apparently sex summons them, because the next morning, the entire state is being assaulted by giant exploding birds of prey. They also slit throats and puke acid. Why? Because of global warming. It's SCIENCE!

So Nathalie and Rod must escape with Deadmeat #1 and Deadmeat #2, rescue a couple of insufferably narcissistic children, and wander around so they can encountering people who tell them that Evil Humans Causing Global Warming are responsible for everything bad. Can they save themselves, or will the Deadly Birds just sort of wander off?

Yeah, this movie is truly dreadful. As in, I'm amazed that director James Nguyen actually got this big stinking slimy turkey into theaters. EVERYTHING about this movie is inept -- the editing, sound, music, the silly special effects. I mean, the explosive birds are "hovering eagle" GIFs that just sort of hang in space, flapping the tips of their wings. WHAT THE?

But Nguyen's skill-vacuum also encompasses writing and plotting. The first half of the story is just random people wandering around doing... nothing much. Fortunately, the second half is a LOT more entertaining, with hysterically silly action scenes (yes! Fight off those birds with coat hangers!) and mind-blowingly silly dialogue ("We must act more like astronauts, spacemen taking care of Spaceship Earth").

Oh yes, the environmental message. Well, let's just say that Nguyen never misses a single opportunity to beat us senseless with his anti-war, anti-oil, environmental message. Characters appear, spew a Big Important Message, and then vanish forever.

As for the acting... what acting? Bagh lives up to his character's name, except I think a curtain rod might show more emotion; Moore is slightly more convincing, but she's not a good enough actress to hide her obvious revulsion at Bagh's very presence. The other actors are either forgettable (that Marine and his girlfriend) or teeth-grindingly annoying (the kids).

And it's WONDERFUL. "Birdemic" is one of those movies that gets every little thing WRONG, and it ends up being hysterically funny as a result. Everyone should see this explosive turkey and appreciate it for its unintentional hilarity.

As most reviewers have unanimously agreed, This is the "best" worst movie ever made. I just think it's THE worst movie ever made! Granted, I howled in sheer disbelief at the hilariously awful bird effects, but that certainly isn't meant to be complimentary. Writer/director (?) James Nguyen may have been a precocious child running around making home movies with his family but he evidently suffers from Peter Pan syndrome and has never grown up.
There are no redeeming qualities and its undeserved cult status has prompted an upcoming sequel called BIRDEMIC - THE RESURRECTION and Alan Bagh is reprising his role as Rod. If Bagh isn't the worst actor in cinematic history, I don't know who is. I won't go into the other horrible "actors", the absence of sound editing, the pompous global warming warning. The birds sum it up---unless you want to experience the most embarrasing 90 minutes in the anals (oops..annals) of movie history, AVOID.

Wow. If you want to see a bad movie it doesn't get better then this. There is no real script,it's just a rip off of dozens of other movies and tv show. The SFX are worse then those in the almost 50 year old movie The Birds(one of the movies it rips off,think about that for a second. There are no actors in this thing,just friends of the director giving the worst line reads you will ever see. Don't even get me started on the sound. If you held the cheapest mike you could find in wal mart under water you would get a better recording of sound then this movie has. This movie is the worst thing I have ever seen,Plan Nine,The Room,and Manos look like Citizen Kane compared to this garbage.

One thing I will say is that the disc is pack with extras,if you want to know how the worst movie ever made was made you can find out.

Only get this movie if you want a good laugh and/or you are getting the Rifftrax.

Holy crap! The budget on this movie must have been six dollars! The only thing in the known universe that made this movie watchable was the glorious Rifftrax riff provided by Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett (you must purchase the Rifftrax seperately from their website, for those of you who are unfamiliar with them). If you own this movie, get the Rifftrax! That is NOT a suggestion, it's a demand!!

Terribly written, horribly directed, and barely acted . The poor deluded director thinks he is the next Hitchcock but he is more like the next Ed Wood- who would have loved those fake birds. The movie is more entertaining than many big budget Hollywood movies-so if you are in the mood for unintentional comedy- this one is keeper.

This movie is so dumb and stupid, that it's laughable, just like Tommy Wiseau's masterpiece, The Room. After watching it a 2nd time with friends, it's a little better, but that's not saying much. The lead actor is always talking about his lame job, the sound is choppy, the birds are incredibly fake looking, the actors are terrible, and they talk about global warming every 10 minutes. Rod is a software salesman who runs into a fashion model named Natalie. They show their melodramatic love story until finally the birdemic starts. (It takes 47 minutes for the birds to start attacking) When they attack, that's when the fun of this movie begins. When they shoot at the birds, it's like the old Nintendo game, Duck Hunt. Rod and Natalie meet up with survivors and help two kids who lost their parents, but don't seem to care enough. Will they survive? This movie is worth a watch. It's so bad, it has to be seen to be believed. I would recommend BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR!!!