'Birdemic: Shock and Terror'

OK, so I decided reviewing serious and worthy stuff was boring. As is trying to give balanced and professional reviews. So here's a review of a truly awful film, hailed by some as a rival to 'Troll 2' and 'The Room' in badness quotient.

I refuse to accept that 'The Room' is a filmic troll, but this...well, for the sake of my sanity, it has to be. And given I've seen films of a similar quality (such as 'Hell Asylum') played entirely straight, I will treat this as a serious endeavour to make a genuine tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds'. 'Birdemic' has got quite a lot of press for being so dire that it has reached the attention of the real world rather than just the geek community. And...well, it lives up to it. This isn't 'Death Nurse' levels of squirmingly they-just-didn't-care bad, this is a 'Troll 2' for our time, though it lacks anything to rival the sexy corncob scene. I'd say it's on a level with 'The Stuff' for bad and 'The Room' for the sense that this was a film the director genuinely cared about and wanted to make (assuming it's played straight for the sake of argument).


Its place in the canon considered, 'Birdemic' has the potential for being an OK scholocky horror film. If you replaced its script, actors, director and CGI with...you know...something a lot better, it might even be a passably funny B-Movie. But the acting is...well, wooden really is the right word, but we use it so casually now that we need a much stronger, more precise word to cover the hilarity of this. I suggest 'paralytic'. The main character has stock options. Which he tells us about at great length. He is incredibly successful at some kind of cubicle-based cold-calling job which somehow nets him a deal for millions of dollars. He practically stalks a girl he fancied at school who, instead of doing what a normal person does and getting a restraining order, agrees to go out with him. And she's a model.

'Birdemic' spends an awful lot of time setting up the relationships between the protagonists. Like, a lot. We didn't have a hint of horror until the hero (I use the term loosely) had asked the girl out, made his company lots of money, gone out with said girl, had sex with said girl, developed a brand new form of solar panel that makes solar power sensible as an energy source, and has told us and his girlfriend about his stock options at length. The whole thing felt like a really boring and amateurish green aesop, even referencing and talking about Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth'. Then badly-CGI'd eagles start attacking people and the hero, his girlfriend and assorted random helpers have to try and escape the...I guess, city?...by shooting eagles with automatic guns one of the supporting characters just happens to have and driving away. I honestly don't know what they expect to find, but it gives much opportunity for awful CGI-eagle attacks, shooting with a ridiculous amount of ammo, explorations of how crazy and evil people get when they're in a bad situation and a scientist who provides exposition and I swear was behind the whole thing. Seriously, if I had made this movie, he would have been controlling the eagles with tiny hats in revenge at humanity for laughing at his crackpot ideas.

Oh, and there's a survivalist hippie who looks like Christopher Walken having a weird day while strung out on dope. Apparently the eagles don't attack people who aren't near the trappings of civilisation or something. At this point we were shouting at the screen for the heroes to kill the hippy and take his treehouse, but alas the forst burns down randomly and they flee. Eventually for no reason the eagles just go away. Like they got sick of the slaughter or something. I guess they were trying to do the vague thing that Hitchcock did with 'The Birds' and not actually explain why the birds attacked, but they just fly off into the distance. For no reason. It's not creepy, it's dumb. Like this movie.

I mean, seriously, nobody could have set out to make a film that was this bad. It's the beauty of bad fiction and film - those who try to make a 'bad' film or novel rarely succeed because they're always winking at the audience. To believe that 'Birdemic' is a self-consciously bad film is to restore one's faith in humanity, but it also denigrates the people who are in it. After all, if they made a bad film, it'll become cult for being bad. If they made a parody, it's so bad it's not even funny. It couldn't have ended up that bad by artifice, so it must have had intentional jokes that were badly-done to the point of becoming really bad. The meta of this explanation breaks my brain, so I'm going to go Ockham's Razor on this and say the simplest explanation is that they really thought they were making an OK movie, and that they ended up with something so hilariously bad it's now secured a spot as something all new comers to our bad movie nights has to see.