Blu-Ray Review: ‘Birdemic: Shock and Terror’ is So Bad, It’s Awful

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CHICAGO – There is a fine line that separates entertainingly bad movies from all-out bores. “The Room” is a truly original, wholly accidental work of comedic genius that greatly benefits from the impenetrable strangeness of its writer/director/star Tommy Wiseau. The film is so funny in so many different ways that it could easy hold up under countless viewings.

“Birdemic: Shock and Terror” is the first film to aim for “Room”-like success with audiences, passing itself off as another unintentionally side-splitting travesty. Yet the picture is nowhere near as hilarious as it thinks it is. Filmmaker James Nguyen is a charmless hack who blatantly steals the plots and characters from classic Hitchcock movies. His copying of “The Birds” is so shameless that it recalls the scandalous cut-and-paste job done by Camillo Teti, who populated his jaw-dropping “Titanic: The Animated Movie” with an assortment of thinly veiled Disney characters.

Blu-Ray Rating: 2.0/5.0

Nguyen’s film is so poorly made that he makes Wiseau look technically competent by comparison, but such lazily inept filmmaking does not necessarily result in a funnier picture. “Birdemic” is best viewed in 30-second glimpses on YouTube than in its interminable 90-minute entirety. The story takes place in Bodega—er, make that Half Moon Bay, where a young couple attempts to survive a series of mysterious bird attacks. Visual effects designer Yeung Chan will have a tough time finding work after this project, unless he’s willing to design Microsoft Clip Art. His effects are easily the worst ever created on a computer (at least Hitch had a bird wrangler). The attack sequences consist entirely of stationary birds flapping their wings while making non-threatening tweeting sounds. Granted, this is uproarious the first time around, but the cheap gag almost immediately turns stale. Nearly as amusing (and annoying) is the work of sound designer John Cregan and sound mixer Erick Jolley, who couldn’t layer sounds with an uninterrupted ambience track if their lives depended on it. The film’s very first line of dialogue, delivered by a perky waitress, is a cataclysmic failure of sound design (her line, by the way, is “Hi”).

Badly animated birds are badly superimposed on bad footage in James Nguyen’s aggressively bad Birdemic: Shock and Terror.
Photo credit: Severin Films

There are many other memorably awkward lines in the picture, since Nguyen refused to allow his actors to change a single word of his dialogue, despite the fact that he hadn’t yet mastered the English language. That explains dialogue like, “It doesn’t hurt to have a secure financial husband to support you,” and “Now I gotta get back to work…you know, sensual work!” Leading man Alan Bagh is a preposterously bad actor, but he never comes close to reaching the Wiseau level of weirdness. He mostly just seems like a bored kid who lost a bet, reading his lines as if reciting a rather dull high school book report. Like Nguyen, he often appears too smart to be giving a performance this stupid. There’s a scene where he looks at a painting of two kissing faces etched on the moon. He stares at the picture and its title for nearly a full minute before exclaiming, “Oh! ‘Lovebirds on the Moon’!” Like nearly every gag in this movie, the line gets an incredulous laugh that quickly dissolves into a vacuum of monotony. Bagh’s love interest is played by Whitney Moore, who also isn’t much of an actress, but at least she’s easy on the eyes. She has a number of scenes with Bagh where they walk haltingly down the sidewalk as if they’re afraid they might run into the camera. And then there’s “Ms. Tippi Hedren,” who gets a whopping third billing in the end credits, despite the fact that she’s only seen in the background of a shot on a TV set playing Nguyen’s first feature, “Julie and Jack” (now that one might be worth checking out).

Birdemic: Shock and Terror was released on Blu-Ray and DVD on Feb. 22, 2011. Photo credit: Severin Films

“Birdemic: Shock and Terror” is allegedly presented in 1080p High Definition (with a 1.77:1 aspect ratio), though the picture remains as grainy as ever. The disc is jam-packed with extras that further illustrate the emerging trend of marketing self-consciously inept cinema to the masses. In a troubling 12-minute featurette, Nguyen embarks on a 60-city tour with the film, milking audiences with even more zeal than Wiseau. When asked about the secret to his film’s success, Nguyen answers, “Honesty and sincerity.” He claims that his film was intended to be serious, and I don’t buy his act for an instant. Though he argues that the reason for the birds’ spontaneous combustion has everything to do with global warming, he immediately contradicts himself by saying, “If I wanted to send a message, I would’ve gone to the post office.” In the film’s slickly edited trailer, Nguyen is referred to as the master of “The Romantic Thriller,” followed by a TM for trademark. Give me a break. His 27-minute interview on “Movie Close-Up” is hilarious, primarily because the condescending enthusiasm of host Bonnie Steiger becomes a joke in and of itself (“You’re making Feature Films!”). There’s a revealing moment when Nguyen mentions his fear of competing against Michael Bay’s long-delayed “Birds” remake (it’s clear he was banking on that film’s release to increase interest in his own film). The fleeting clips from his previous work play like excerpts from the “Birdemic” version of “Vertigo.”

Nguyen is at his most tedious during the audio commentary, where he incoherently expounds on his phony intentions. He cites Hitchcock, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and the 1980 Christopher Reeve romance “Somewhere in Time” as his primary inspirations. His idea of pure cinema is apparently artlessly lensed pan shots of empty exteriors. Even the director can barely suppress his own chuckles when viewing this mess. The second commentary is the only redeeming thing on this disc, with “Birdemic” fan Bobby Hacker grilling Bagh and Moore about the directions they received from Nguyen. Moore lists the multitude of red flags, starting with her audition in the parking lot of a San Jose high school. An hour after she arrived onset, Nguyen handed her a pair of “breast cutlets” and ordered her to wear them. His verbal and emotional abuse of Moore seems to have been modeled after Hitchcock’s treatment of Hedren, particularly his embittered decision to feed her directions through Bagh. Moore seems relieved to be through with the ordeal, though Bagh has already signed on for “Birdemic II: The Resurrection 3D,” due out this year. Now that’s scary.

By MATT FAGERHOLM Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com matt@hollywoodchicago.com