Birdemic: Shock and Terror — Reviewing the IMDb Bottom 10
The eagles are coming!
James Nguyen was born in the South Vietnamese city of Da Nang in 1966. When he was 8 years old, shortly preceding the Fall of Saigon, his family fled the country. By the New Millenium, James was living in California, working as a software salesman in Silicon Valley. At the same time, he was developing a passion for cinema, mainly the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
In the 2000s, he wrote and directed two feature films: the romantic melodrama Julie and Jack, and the science fiction Replica, which wouldn’t be released until 2017. It wasn’t until he released his third feature in 2010 that he would achieve the status of cinema legend, but not in the way he could ever have imagined. He had made his opus Birdemic: Shock and Terror which, 13 years after its release, has become a classic of "so bad, it’s good" cinema.
The film had a budget of $10,000 and took four years to produce, with Nguyen having to work around the schedules of his cast and crew. He was obsessed with Hitchcock’s The Birds. He even managed to cast that film's star Tippi Hedren in the role of Julie in his film Julie and Jack. No, not the titular character of Julie, another character named Julie. That should be an indication of his screenwriting talents. Footage of Hedren in Julie and Jack can be seen playing on TV in Birdemic, during one of the film's most memorably awkward sequences. Nguyen even listed Hedren in the credits of Birdemic, as the character of "Footage from Julie and Jack".
Birdemic takes inspiration from the basic story of The Birds, with two star-crossed lovers meeting at a random location and falling in love. It's strictly a romantic film for the first half, and then out of the blue, we are shown a wide shot of the town of Half Moon Bay, devastated by CG clip art of eagles and flames.
Nguyen was seemingly trying to emulate the structure of The Birds, with the sudden switch from melodrama to survival horror. Perhaps he was one of few people lucky enough to go into the film cold, not knowing what to expect from it. However, needless to say, Hitchcock handled the transition much more gracefully. Underneath the romance, there was an underlying tension, a sense that something was going to go terribly wrong. I suppose Nguyen tried to convey that in his film, but it didn't translate well in the final product.
It's hard to describe the experience of watching Birdemic to those who are uninitiated. It's something you gotta see for yourself. It's almost a perfect guide on how not to make a film in the English language, made by someone who likely doesn't have the firmest grasp on the language or the culture.
Right off the bat, the film carries a home movie vibe, with a handheld camera filming from behind a car's dashboard, with a continuous loop of about 30 seconds of stock music in the background. The music is credited to one Andrew Seger, although he only contributed two pieces to the film, one of which being a soundalike of John Lennon's Imagine (I coincidentally saw this film just hours after "The Beatles" released their "new" song, and didn't realize it). Most of the soundtrack consists of stock music licensed from Smartsound Software.
Our main character is Rod who, like Nguyen, lives as a software salesman, just like the character of Jack in Julie and Jack. Some more A+ screenwriting. Rod is played by Alan Bagh, who gives one of the most robotic performances you'll ever see. When we first meet Rod, he gets out of his Ford Mustang and walks down the sidewalk like an alien trying to mimic human behavior, blankly staring ahead. He continues this blank stare when he first locks eyes with an attractive blonde named Natalie in a café. She is played by Whitney Moore, and she does the best she can in feigning affection for a plank of wood.
Their first date is at a Vietnamese restaurant, one that was likely owned by a friend of the director, and the director shows up in a Hitchcock-style cameo. We get a long pan of the mural on the wall of the restaurant, almost as if we're watching an advertisement. It is a nice mural, though.
The couple chat about their jobs. Rod talks about his cushy software job, and then asks Natalie…
"Tell me about Molly. What do you like about it?"
After a couple of seconds of wondering how this suddenly steered into a discussion of drug preferences, you realize he meant to say, "Tell me about modeling." Damn it, Rod, enunciate!
The film is padded to the gills with filler. Nguyen thought it was very important to show almost the entirety of Rod's commute to work. How else would we know how he got to his destination? It does give us the opportunity to see these sweet California gas prices circa 2008.
You also get a barroom musical act performed by one Damien Carter, a poorly lip-synced R&B number called Just Hangin' Out. Even that sounds like it was written by an alien (or an A.I.) trying to assimilate into human culture.
Then, we finally see those CGI birds, which are as shockingly terrible as the title may suggest. They just copied and pasted a bunch of digital bird GIFs all over the screen, with no sense of space. Birds in the background will fly in front of objects in the foreground, and they hover in place while flapping their wings.
It's a full-on bird apocalypse, with supplies of food and gas depleting, prices going up, and people pointing their toy guns at the sky, and at each other. Yet, at the same time, the traffic appears to be flowing like normal, and people in the background seem to be enjoying a leisurely stroll on the beach.
Our survivors meet a colorful array of characters, including an ornithologist and a woodsman living in a treehouse, all of whom serve as mouthpieces for the director’s message on global warming. Earlier in the film, Rod and Natalie go on a double date with two of their friends, and their date night movie is An Inconvenient Truth. I would say that's crazy, but I guess some devoted ideologues would be into that sort of thing.
"Hey, Jan! It's me, Trish! Me and Dave are gonna go on a date tonight. We're gonna see Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas! Why don't you and Matt come along? C'mon! It'll be so much fun, Jan!"
Birdemic is one of those must-see bad films. I would recommend seeing it with company, perhaps some stoner buddies or an intimate partner to nibble on. If you're a hermit with no friends, there's also the RiffTrax version available on YouTube, if you're into that sort of thing.
Watching the film by yourself can get tiresome by the end, unless you have an active imagination and sense of humor. You may start to think, "Maybe it’s not such a good idea to support independent filmmakers after all. Maybe I should go buy five tickets to see the next Disney movie instead."
