B-Movie Review: Birdemic (2010)

There are plenty of badly made movies out there, most of them unintentionally so.  But this last movie I saw, the questionably titled Birdemic: Shock and Terror, was so bad that I can only think that creator James Nguyen was doing it on purpose.  Seriously, this movie was painful to watch and even those that love horrifyingly bad films may have trouble getting through this one.

The movie is supposed to be about a plague of birds that begins attacking people.  Yeah, it’s basically a rip-off of the old Hitchcock film.  But that’s where any comparisons to Hitchcock leave off.  The first 45 minutes of this 1 ½ hour film revolves around the male lead, Rod, trying to hook up with the female lead, Nathalie.  In between scenes of him wooing her and her mother, we get to see Rod at work, making sales and becoming a big shot with designs on building his own solar energy company.

Then, suddenly, while the couple is doing the nasty at a hotel, the birds attack.  There’s no reason why, but the air suddenly fills with eagles and vultures (or at least that’s what I’ve read they’re supposed to be) that attack people and dive-bomb into gas stations.  As our heroes (?) try to flee for their lives, those in the background of any given shot (i.e.: those unaware that a movie is being filmed) simply go about their daily lives, seemingly unaware of the rabid birds everywhere.  Of course, the birds were CGIed in post and look like someone made them on a 1980s Apple computer, so I wouldn’t be that scared either.

The couple finds another couple at the hotel and they all decide to carpool.  Lucky for Rod and Nathalie, the other couple also has a machine gun and some pistols handy, so they can shoot the bird plague from the skies.  Together, they set out to go… wherever.  Along the way, people die, other people join the group and Rod and Nathalie learn all about global warming from the survivors they meet.  At the end, the birds fly off for no particular reason and everyone is safe again.

This crap-pile of a film is used by Nguyen as a heavy-handed vehicle for talking about environmental issues.  Even in the middle of a bloody bird attack, people still find time to tell the main characters all about the horrible things that man is doing to the planet.  Seriously, there’s as much pro-green exposition as there are fight scenes between man and bird.  Oh, and there also happens to be about 20 minutes of parking and driving away moments.  For some reason the director decided to book-end EVERY SINGLE SCENE by having people get into or out of their cars.  This is padding at its finest.

Birdemic might actually be worth a watch if you’re a person that really enjoys the worst of the worst.  Or, if you’re feeling even braver, you can double up and check out the recently released Birdemic 2: The Resurrection once you’re done with the first one.  I’ll leave you with this warning, however - watching more than an hour-and-a-half of this rubbish may result in brain cancer.  The final judgment - Birdemic makes Ed Wood movies look like Oscar material.

Photo Credits -           

Birdemic courtesy of justplainsomething.com