The Word “Vulture” Is Never Spoken

My bio indiates that I enjoy good wine and bad science fiction movies. I got the double-shot yesterday. We’ll begin with a nice pinot grigio, Arca Maggiore ’10. My friends favor sweet wines and I prefer them dry, so a pinot grigio is a good compromise as there are sweet notes and a cirspness that I find refreshing and interesting. The reviewers aren’t lying when they refer to the green apple taste; it went very nicely with a garlic and pepper roasted chicken. As a bonus, the price point is below ten dollars, so it’s easy to grab a bottle or two and only laying out a Hamilton for a bottle is pretty painless even if the wine turns out to be not to your liking.

But really, you aren’t interested in the wine and I’m not, either. A nice Pinot Grigio is a transitory pleasure; the stuff is drunk so young, and is easy enough to find in at least reasonable quality, that I do not see any need to invest tremendous effort into finding really good stuff. Grab pretty much any bottle and you’re good to go.

No, by now, you’re wondering about the bad science fiction movie. And I’ve got a doozy for you.

Birdemic: Shock and Terror is at minimum a bronze-medal candidate for worst movie of the decade, and should get a nod, if not an honorable mention, on the all-time list. The movie purports to tell the story of Rod and Nathalie, a very attractive and successful couple falling in love in Silicon Valley, whose romance is interrupted by the sudden and ominous attack of birds turned into malign monsters, while at the same time delivering an important environmental message. In execution, however, what the movie delivers is a troika of dreadful ennui, stunned disbelief, and moments of cruel point-and-laugh hilarity not unlike watching the William Hung audition.

Inspired at least as much by Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (a movie which actually had, in absolute dollars, a larger budget than Birdemic) as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the movie includes nearly every hallmark of awful filmmaking. I won’t even pretend this is a comprehensive list:

1. At 90 minutes, this is a well-padded film: (a) At least 10 of the 90 minutes are shots from the dashboard of a car, showing oncoming traffic but no visible human being and no dialogue. (b) About five minutes of a karaoke singer earnestly singing an uninteresting song to an otherwise-empty bar in which the protangonists dance badly and out of rythym, which lacks either emotional or lyrical relationship to the alleged plot. (c) A multiplicity of much longer-than-necessary establishing shots of locations, like bland-looking office buildings, watching the hero lock his car and walk down streets, the Bay Bridge at night, restaraunts apparently owned by crew members’ parents or which comped food for the cast in exchange for a mention, and a particularly memorable forty-second pan across the mural in a Vietnamese restaraunt, which really doesn’t have much to do with anything. (d) I don’t think I needed five minutes of walking around the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival, either.
2. To call the dialogue wooden would be an insult to dining room tables everywhere. The scriptwriter can be forgiven for not having English as a primary language and perhaps not having a feel for the nuances of conversation. And the clunkiness of the dialogue mirrors the clunkiness of his own speech patterns. But it becomes clear that the problem is not lack of native mastery of English, but rather a lack of anything to have the characters say.
3. The first act of the film, which takes approximately sixteen days of the movie’s ninety-minute runtime, tells the Mary Sue story of the hero, Rod, for whom everything in the world is going perfect. He closes a million-dollar software sale. He already makes enough money to afford a modified Mustang that gets 100 miles to the gallon (really?), and his own single-family home somewhere in Silicon Valley, and his company just got bought out by Oracle so his stock options make him wealthy. His side business owns a patent on a ridiculously efficient solar panel aimed at home use (why, then, does he buy a competitor’s solar panel?) that he successfully pitches to venture capitalists to the tune of ten million dollars (but doesn’t seem to plan on leaving his job as a software salesman). And he tops off this success sundae with a dollop of Closing The Deal With A Victoria’s Secret Cover Girl By Respecting Her For Her Mind. What does any of this have to do with birds attacking? Why, nothing. Nothing at all. But it is dreadfully boring, and it left me rooting for the birds, because I wanted these characters to die as punishment for their failure to amuse me and their apparent lack of enjoyment of their remarkably successful lives.
4. The global-warming-is-causing-the-bird-attack message is preachy, ham-handed, and not particularly believable. But my main objection is that it’s preachy.
5. The acting is really, really bad. Well, not uniformly — the actor who plays Nathalie, the girlfriend, is actually reasonably good; her facial expressions and vocal delivery are credible and appear to contain emotion. Not so for the hero or pretty much any other character. The best I can say about Alan Bagh‘s on-screen delivery in this film is that he has VERY clear diction. Each word is fully-formed, clearly delivered, and completed with a brief pause before breath, and then the next word is begun. The end result left this reviewer hoping for the emotional punch and convincing delivery of a Stephen Hawking lecture. And aside from his co-star Whitney Moore, Mr. Bagh is the best actor in the film. (In mitigation, both Mr. Baugh and Ms. Moore are quite attractive.)
6. The sound editing is awful. Seriously. The tone is set during the first scene of the film when Rod and Nathalie meet by chance in a Half Moon Bay diner and we get the traditional back-and-forth of characters in conversation. Shots of Rod speaking have obnoxious background noise almost as loud as him, with a high volume and a high reverb, while shots of Nathalie are normally-mixed and have appropriate background noise. There is a noticable pause of silence at each screen edit, and several such pauses in the middle of later scenes.
7. When the birds finally do attack, it happens out of the blue. There is no indication of anything that is particularly wrong beforehand, and suddenly Santa Cruz is a war zone! When the birds stop attacking, it’s also for no reason at all. I know some people who have talked about making movies and including things that happen for no apparent reason. “It’s just unexplained,” they’ll say when asked about plot point X. “The characters never find out why.” This may seem amusing, intriguing, or fun to the filmmaker, but it’s not very considerate to the audience, who expect some degree of narrative explanation for on-screen events.
8. When the birds finally do attack, they look awful. Not scary or terrifying; who would be terrified of grossly misproportioned, stationary clip art? And the unfortunate coincidence of poor blocking and a poorly-concieved use of weapons in the movie makes it appear that the heroes of the film are a greater danger to innocent civilians than the birds themselves. Here, see for yourself:

You might notice how it looks like the brunette girl really looks like she got shot to death by the blonde girl. A similar, but even more egregious, misuse of guns is perpetrated by a character who is supposed to be an Iraq War vet using a semi-automatic weapon to shoot at birds attacking a bus filled to the brim with three extras.

The fires and explosions were immensely more believable in the PC videogame Diablo II.

The YouTube clip above doesn’t show the Acid Egg Attack, either. Or maybe it did; I could only get through about three minutes of it before The Wife made me turn it off becasue she just couldn’t stand it. (EDIT: Yes, you can see the Acid Egg Attack, at about 3:45.) You don’t get a good look at the visibly-breathing dead people and the re-used Red Cross disaster training makeup used to show the instantly fatal efects of instantaneous encounters with birds.

Really, it’s kind of a challenge to set out the movie’s flaws. Kind of like eating an elephant — you just have to start somewhere and start working through it. There is probably no facet of filmmaking — foley, electrical work, boom mike handling, blocking, costuming — that is not laughably bad about this film. Please don’t infer any sort of priority of evaluation in the order of the list above; I can’t say, for instance, whether the dialogue was worse than the alleged cameo appearance of Tippi Hedrin — a credit whose origins are so sketchy it borders on being an outright lie.

The director, James Nguyen, plans to release a 3d sequel next year, set in Hollywood. From the YouTube interview I liked to above, he seems to relish in the awfulness of his creations. Good for him — it would be much more sad if he actually took himself seriously. Instead, we can all in good humor and good conscience get a little bit inebriated, and then revel in the spectacular craptitiude that is Birdemic: Shock and Terror.