Now.
There is another kind of bad movie, however, that is wholly and completely different than the other kinds I just mentioned. This is the kind of bad movie that, to put it simply, tries too hard to be bad.
What do I mean? Try to imagine actors who intentionally press themselves to be as wooden as possible. A director whose fashion consists of positioning his actors in no less than three different setups for the same scene in less than a minute's time. Or a sound man whose dialogue scenes have so many variations of background noise from cut to cut that you halfway expect to see different camcorder time code readings on the bottom right of the screen.
In this day and age, anyone who lets these kind of things slip by and presents them in their finished product without a hint of post-production is not just a bad director. They are a bad director BY INTENTION. Meaning that they intentionally direct in such a way so that they draw attention to their horrific edits, stiltedly lame actors and deadening dialogue. They want to be Ed Wood.
Such a director is James Nguyen. And such a product is Birdemic: Shock and Terror.
This sound so hypocritical coming from me, a man who lives for the worst films have to offer. But the problem with Birdemic: Shock and Terror is that it wants to be bad, but it also wants to be self-aware and self-referential of its badness and perform that balancing act between bad filming and a vaudeville act. A bad vaudeville act. One where the hook is already set to pull the act offstage.
Like if a bunch of hipsters tried making a self-referentially incompetent movie.
I would have loved this movie so much more if there was the slightest hint that the director (or ANYONE involved for that matter) took his subject matter seriously. But this movie looks for everything like a bad joke told badly by talentless dopes.
Birdemic: Shock and Terror is a bad movie, but it's trying to convince you that its ineptness is part of its message. This is going to come as a shock to you, but if that's the message, then its message is a few sentences off.
This plot may give you seizures, so read with caution: Young businessman Rod (Alan Bagh) is on the verge of closing the biggest deal of his career (What deal? Don't ask). And he has also met aspiring model Nathalie (Whitney Moore), with whom he seems to hit it off immediately. As a successful model (in spite of the fact that she seems to get her pictures taken inside a one-hour photo shop), she apparently has an empty void in her life that only love can fill....
Sorry, I almost cared about that development for a second. Moving on...
After a few dates, Rod and Nathalie take a road trip to get to know each other and, after a stopover in a hotel, wake to discover that the outside world has been overrun with eagles and vultures who intend to attack and kill every living human on the planet. Or at least in California. Who will live? Who will die? What does global warming have to do with this? Why can't we just give peace a chance?
Yes, this is a direct ripoff of The Birds. Such a bald-faced ripoff, in fact, that Hitchcock should come back from the dead just to slap everyone involved with Birdemic: Shock and Terror from Nguyen on down the line (or up the line, whichever). It is absolutely implausible that Nguyen as writer or director could have looked at this finished product and not noticed all the flaws in line, acting and composition...and still deemed it fit to release.
And I doubt that it would have gone beyond the doors and into the screens of any self-respecting movie house, let alone the doors of Severin Films (who released this on DVD) if they saw the dips and valleys this film went to...without knowing something was up.
What do I mean? Take the first few minutes of film, where it simply shows cars driving down the freeway. So many different shots, angles, natural background sounds and light setups are used in a scene that is supposedly a continuous shot from Point A to Point B that Nguyen (as producer!) should have noticed something was up and tried to cover it all in post-production. Though I have a feeling that would have put too much of a strain on his camcorder.
Also, the music that is used for this particular scene - the main theme, in fact - is generic and merry-go-round-sounding in itself but also has the unfortunate happenstance of being only half as long as the scene it is supposed to be playing in the background of. So after a few seconds silence, THEY PLAY THE ENTIRE THEME AGAIN! And the scene STILL ends seconds after the theme has finished playing AGAIN! I don't know who was responsible for making the final decisions on how to use this music or put it in the film itself (though I have my sneaking suspicions), but I think they did so without either hearing the music in question or looking at which scene they were putting it in.
That's just ONE problem, though. Bagh and Moore have absolutely zero charisma, no presence, THE MOST vacant facial expressions known to man and do not know the first thing about how to invest a line with any kind of urgency, emotion, interest or even differences in tone. Bagh can't even do the simple act of walking down the sidewalk convincingly! Every time he and Moore speak to each other it's like watching two stoners discussing where their next hit's coming from. It's like watching the mannequins interact in those Old Navy commercials. Again this is something that should have been corrected in post, but I have an idea as to why it wasn't....
The other actors fare no better. Whether they be best friends of the leads, their bosses, relatives, strangers, recently-orphaned children, tree-hugging forest dwellers, evil fat guys in cowboy hats or convenience store clerks, not a single person in this thing can speak naturally, walk naturally, move like it doesn't hurt them in some way or even stand still convincingly. But I think I know why that is (I'm getting there, I'm getting there).
There are only two kinds of scenes in Birdemic: Shock and Terror - scenes that go on far too long, and others that end much too abruptly. There is one scene where Bagh and Moore are dancing in what must be a nightclub but looks more like a restaurant with the tables moved off to one side where the Nightclub Singer (Damien Carter) looks, acts and sings about as funky as Andy Williams, and this scene goes on for roughly 2-3 hours. Seriously, I don't care if I was madly, hopelessly in love with the most beautiful woman in the world, I would NOT dance with her as long as this one song seemed to take these two to vacantly smile at each other while Nightclub Singer did his thang.
Another completely different scene involved what seemed to be a business call where Bagh's character had just closed a business deal in what seemed to be a 30-second telemarketing call...and made $1 million in the process. Judging from the flat delivery of his lines, I'm guessing the guy on the other end agreed to the sale just to get off the line and would renege on the sale later. But still, what about the call? What was he selling? Who was he talking to? How much of a take does he get for making the sale? Doesn't matter, because this scene takes maybe a minute or so of screen time, but adds nothing to the equation but the act of taking up a minute or so of screen time. Moving on....
There's a lot of scenes like that. Business meetings that are all too brief and go nowhere. Talks with friends and mothers that go on forever and also go nowhere. All of them spliced together out of completely random takes, setups, angles and, it would appear, different types of microphones for recording the sound of each cut. It's maddening that this kind of thing would be acceptable in this day and age of DIY film-making, when it is so easy to make things like this seamless....
BUT, that is not James Nguyen's intention.
For all of these people who enjoy the heck out of Birdemic: Shock and Terror because it is a throwback to the really bad school of film-making that was easily accessible in the Fifties and Sixties, I put to you that this is exactly what Nguyen was aiming for. Yes, something as bad as Birdemic: Shock and Terror is no accident - it is planned. Every scene, beginning and end. I tell you, Nguyen meant for this film to be as bad as it is.
Why? Because even Ed Wood was able to get earnest scenes out of his actors. Because Uwe Boll can make the right choice when it comes to finding good actors to put in his lousy films. Because Jimmy McAlarney from Miss Teback's Seventh Grade Visual Arts class can mask differences in sound and visuals from scene to scene of his little five-minute movie project with judicious editing in Windows Movie Maker. In short, even the worst of us can work to make a bad movie even a little better.
Birdemic: Shock and Terror was a movie that no one even tried to make better...because that would have ruined everything
And the last exhibit I can submit to prove this fact are the birds of Birdemic: Shock and Terror themselves. You remember the flying toasters in the computer screen savers that came out in the mid-Nineties that just kind of gently glided by, pieces of toast flapping stiffly by their sides every so often to simulate flight?
Those toasters looked more graceful than the birds here.
I swear to you, God as my witness, there is not one natural bird in this movie. Every scene with a bird has CGI done by what looks like someone who was learning binary code as they went along. Birds stay in place, hovering in mid-air forever as their wings flap even less convincingly than the flying monkeys in The Wizard Of Oz.
You know how you do shadow figures against a lamp light on a wall and hook your thumbs together, cross your hands, then make waving motions with your fingers to simulate flapping wings? That's it - that is the birds in Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Not a joke.
And that is how every bird, no matter the genus, looks and moves in this. Beginning to end, first bird scene to last bird scene. They make the humans look to move as gracefully as ballet dancers. Almost.
Nguyen can hide it all he wants but I'm telling you, we are all being suckered in. Birdemic: Shock and Terror is a movie that we are supposed to laugh at. He made a movie that is a straight-out send-up along the lines of The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavera, only without the black-and-white cinematography or Fifties-level competent incompetency. It's hard to explain to the layman, but let me go about it like this:
Birdemic: Shock and Terror looks like any other incompetent movie that would be done by a DIY film-maker and shilled at your local Comic Con right next to the Conrad Brooks table with his copies of Jan Gel: The Beast From The East, but whereas Brooks worked with what he had, it's all too obvious that Nguyen had access to better all along.
He could have made better writing and directing choices. He could have hired better actors. He could have made editor Kim Chow do better cuts. But he didn't. Because he wanted to make a midnight movie.
That's what Birdemic: Shock and Terror is - a movie to go up as a double-bill with Tommy Wiseau's The Room with an impromptu Q&A immediately following.
You don't get this bad by accident - this is something that is quite methodically arrived at after extended planning, and that is what it seems to have worked out as for James Nguyen; he got his movie made, released and shown to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who seem to think that Nguyen thinks that Birdemic: Shock and Terror is a serious work - even with all the references to global warming, saving the Earth, living in peace and so on.
In the end, with all the money Nguyen has made with Birdemic: Shock and Terror, all the fame/notoriety he and everyone involved has gained with this project, not to mention the inevitable sequel brought up not long after a whirlwind tour of college showing nation-wide, it would seem that Nguyen got his point across.
If you make a movie purposely bad enough, market it as a serious feature then play up the fact that everyone takes it as a so-good-it's-bad, then not only are you going to make money, you're going to make sure that you're at least as famous as Ed Wood.
Though to be fair to Wood, he would have at least sprung for some real birds.
And some real actors.
