Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

Review by Sean Patterson



"She's MY hot Ferrari!"

The trailer for Birdemic has been an internet phenomenon for a while now, so I just had to see it for myself, to make sure it's a joke. Birdemic is two different movies. The first half seems to be the story of a mentally challenged man and the townspeople that pull together to help him feel a part of adult life. The second half is a bizarre, didactic, and incomprehensible environmentalist missive.
Okay. I don't think the main character, Rod (Alan Bagh), is supposed to be cranially handicapped. That's just the funniest way my girlfriend and I found to interpret it. The sad truth is the actor portraying him is incredibly bad. I got the feeling at certain points that he was reading his lines from cue cards off-screen. And from the way the movie was edited, this is a very real possibility.
The first forty minutes is spent following Rod as he goes about his week. Waking up, eating breakfast. Watching the news. Having business meetings at work. We see him getting stuck in traffic, the camera apparently left on the dashboard for minutes at a time. It's insanely boring, but also incredibly fascinating in the sense that writer/director James Nguyen thought anyone would want to watch it. This is material that seems written specifically for Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
So, Rod begins dating Nathalie (Whitney Moore), a hot blonde Victoria's Secret model. Did I mention the company Rod works for was just sold for a Billion dollars? This is the sort of logic that makes Birdemic hilarious. But it's all so sincere that you almost feel sorry for laughing. I was definitely laughing at the movie, instead of with it. But I, like the movie, am getting sidetracked.
Whitney Moore doesn't belong in this film. Where every other actor is nearly as bad as Bagh, she truly shines, somehow delivering her ridiculous lines naturally and making her character seem likable and real. I suspect Moore might have a real career in acting if she can land some decent roles.
Earlier I mentioned the editing. Each line of dialogue gets its own cut. Each cut has its own individual background noise or are looped and have none at all. But it's not just the audio that's bad here. Poor audio is a hallmark of low-budget horror and largely forgivable. The editing is so poor that each of these snippets of dialogue is proceeded and succeeded by an awkward one to two second pause while the actor stares off-screen. This makes the conversations incredibly stilted, as if the communication is taking place via satellite in 1998.
When the birds finally show up they hover in the air, looking anything but threatening. They hover in place without flapping their wings and then dive bomb into the scenery, exploding but causing no damage. They look cartoonish and remind me of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
At this point, the movie becomes incomprehensible. At times, it's so dangerous outside that it's unthinkable for the characters to exit their beat up old van. At others they seem perfectly happy, with smiles on their faces, to stroll through a park and have a picnic or to seek out a stream in a forest. This is all before the hippy who lives in a tree tells them that the birds only attack people driving evil gas-burning vehicles. How would he know such a thing?
The hippy gets a long soliloquy, as does a random old man, about global warming and the dangerous human species. Neither of them explain why eagles are kamikazeing gas stations or pooping acid. It appears as if the movie was made to be an environmental movement propaganda piece. The website imaginepeace.com is prominently featured on a sign and a tshirt throughout the movie. But again, this apparent sincerity is offset by the pure ridiculousness of everything about this production. Part of me still suspects they might be making fun of tree-huggers.
Birdemic is the perfect storm of bad acting, writing, and directing. That makes it worth an ironic viewing, but only if you have the Rifftrax or your own friends to help you make fun.