In a recent piece in Harper's, Tom Bissell wrote about the film The Room as what he called a "post-camp cult film." That's the best description of Birdemic I can find. "It's so bad that it's good" is the general force at work here. Bissell beautifully explains the film as the "movie that an alien who has never seen a movie might make after having had movies thoroughly explained to him."
To describe the story that director James Nguyen wrote and directed is sorta silly, but I feel formally obliged to do it here. Rod works for an Internet sales company and one day bumps into hottie Nathalie in a diner at lunch. He asks her out and she says yes. They go out and fall in love.
At some point, totally unrelated to the romance, a flock of killer eagles begins attacking people in the Bay Area and killing them. Rod and Nathalie have to escape the terror from above and kill as many of the birds as they can in the process. Not to ruin anything (not that it matters if you know), but the birds ultimately give up and fly away for no reason. There's really no shock or terror in this at all.
The film is basically a re-hash of M. Night Shyamalan's terrible work from 2008, The Happening. In that, there was something weird where nature was killing people with wind and trees. In this, it seems nature is mad a humans for being bad to the environment, so it sends mad eagles to get the people. (By the way, if there was ever evidence that Shyamalan was a terrible writer and director it is that this movie - which is totally ridiculous - borrows the entire story, including small details, and it comes out totally silly.)
It it hard to explain how terrible every aspect of this film is. Aside from the silly story, every other technical aspect of the film is bad. The acting is beyond wooden (I'm guessing these are non-actors and maybe just Nguyen's friends), the editing is terrible, frequently cutting scenes off before they are finished. The sound is even horrible, cutting in an out as actors are speaking and leaving gaps of silence between visual cuts.
Maybe what makes the film so deliciously horrible is the special effect birds we see throughout the film. They look like birds you might have seen on a computer screen saver from around 1989. They don't move much and seem to hover in the air flapping their wings slowly, like giant, slow humming birds. Some of them are able to hang in the air without moving their wings, as if they were soaring, but also remain still as they do it. They are totally ridiculous and over-the-top.
It seems that this film, which was released in New York this past March, is already a cult hit. I saw it at a midnight screening where the audience was there to see something horrible and knew what they were getting (some of them might have seen it before, as they seemed to be laughing in advance of terrible things happening).
I'm not sure this would play well watching soberly in one's home. It's a bit like a really bad Rocky Horror Picture Show (there's even an amazing musical scene in a bar with a guy singing solo - though he apparently has invisible back-up singers and band). It looks like Nguyen is already working on a sequel to this film (The Resurrection). I look forward to that.
Stars: 0 of 4 (or alternatively "A Billion Stars")
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