By Keri O’Shea
There’s a strange feeling of foreboding when you browse a film you’re due to review and find it’s one of those rarest of beasts – one of IMDb’s ‘Worst Rated’. Considering the sheer amount of films which are listed on that site, this means any film getting a mention for how appalling it is must have a very special set of qualities indeed. But then, taste is so subjective, and there’s a surprisingly fine line between so bad it’s good, and just – bad. I’ve pondered this division before, and it turns out it can sometimes be a difficult one to call, at least on first impressions alone. But, still. At the time of writing, Birdemic: Shock and Terror rates an impressive 1.8 out of 10. And that at least says something. Whatever else it is, it’s a noteworthy film in that respect.
It’s not long before Birdemic begins to reveal its noteworthiness in other respects: the opening credits misspell ‘Cast’ as ‘Casts’, for starters, and then with no further ado we’re treated to an excruciating diner scene in which we are introduced to key players Rod (Alan Bagh) and Nathalie (Whitney Moore, who apparently doubled up her role to become make-up artist after the first two make-up artists quit). The film’s first shock revelation now becomes apparent: director James Nguyen only has one camera. This variously means that the same scene has to be stopped and repeated to get a modicum of footage together for editing, which goes some way towards excusing the casts for seeming so pained and awkward. This lack of kit really comes into its own during a scene intended to represent a high-powered business meeting, but more on that later: the point for the time being is, Rod likes Nathalie, and in the universe of Birdemic this makes it acceptable to terrifyingly try to chat her up, eventually wearing her down with glassy eye-contact and an inability to read a menu in a normal human way. Some by-the-by commentary on a TV introduces the theme of the environment going awry, which is as far as we get with context, but, whatever; Rod is having a good day otherwise. He has scared Nathalie into a date, secured a million-dollar deal at his telesales job and chatted to a man about getting a solar panel fitted to his house. It doesn’t get any better than this. It’s the American Dream. A ‘love scene’ ensues where everyone stays clothed, but at least it gets the main characters into a room so that we’re ready for the birds to attack first thing in the morning.
The birds themselves are an obvious facet of the film’s 1.8 out of 10 score, of course. If you think you’ve seen – and hated – bad, cheap, needless CGI elsewhere during your lives, then you could still learn a great deal from Birdemic; looking like animation from a Commodore 64, there has been absolutely no success in making them look like credible critters, nor indeed doing anything to the animation to make them look like anything other than transfer tattoos someone has crudely applied to the film. That’s before we get to the way they appear and disappear, or that some of them inexplicably explode while others don’t, or that their flight doesn’t seem to follow any rules of physics, or indeed that there’s only one type of bird that I could feasibly make out, and that’s some sort of eagle-y thing. A species not native to the part of the world where there is meant to happen, by the way. Attacking for a very ill-defined reason, before one day just deciding to fuck off out to sea (and for once I have no worries about spoilering…)
However, the birds themselves are only part of Birdemic’s epic failure on every single level of storytelling, script, editing, cohesion, and overall skill in filmmaking. Apparently, this film took four years of work on Nguyen’s part, a fact which is strange and unusual; it makes me almost pleased we have a derivative crowdsourced zombie movie in the offing (still) here in the UK which has taken more than double that time, or else this would all seem like a situation which doesn’t make sense, a weird one-off, a rift in space/time. Surely, after all, more years’ work would mean more time to improve, re-shoot, edit better, even re-write. Instead, exterior shots of a car seem like a good idea over and above everything else, although actual knowledge of cars is a bit on the thin side. Amounts of money thrown around in the dialogue don’t make any sense and come across as childish, simply sums pulled out of the air: Rod nails a one million deal from a crappy telesales cubicle whilst barely needing to say anything to the person who’s clearly definitely really on the other end of the phone, let alone rousing himself from his Quaalude fug; the business itself, however, soon after sells for A BILLION (hence the stop-start-shake her hand again business meeting which really epitomises the clumsiness of the one-camera approach). These are Mickey Mouse Club numbers, making it glaringly obvious that the script and its writer are circling the airport. And there’s more. The desperate race away from the occasionally explosive eagles to the coast starts with people armed with coat hangers; the same people eventually opt for automatic weapons, admittedly, but will also drive past a convenience store to go fishing in the open, eagle-infested air (magically catching fish from water barely deep enough to wet your feet in, too) or if they do head into a shop for emergency supplies, Nathalie thinks this means a bottle of Cava – so at least there’s one sensible decision in this film. Oh, and someone’s mobile phone goes off. By that stage in the game, it hardly matters.
None of this, of course, tells you anything about whether I enjoyed it or not.
I think it varied as the film went on, to be honest: to start with, the sheer ineptitude of the edits and the script were absolutely joyous, and I fell about laughing at the initial bird-strikes. But I had some company at the time, whereas I watched the end of the film on my own, and eventually blew my funny fuse. There’s only so much of that sort of hilarity you can really appreciate when watching solo. By the end, I felt as though I was privy to the goings-on of a parallel universe – neither funny nor sad, just different. It’s clear to see that Birdemic: Shock and Terror is at its best as a spectator sport, and a film which could exponentially increase in entertainment value according to how many viewers it has at a given time. Its weird blend of innocence, earnestness and ineptitude is oddly charming, but would benefit by a crowd to appreciate it. This is almost certainly why it’s garnered its reputation as something between an endurance challenge and a cursed videotape (and why I think Sundance was wrong to reject it; the hysteria it could have caused at a mass viewing would have been its own reward.) Definitely one of those movies which needs to be seen to be believed, this one – and as luck would have it, Severin Films are about to oblige.
Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) will be released by Severin Films on 15th February 2016.