A Moviehead Pictures
Production
Cast:
Alan Bagh…..Rod
Whitney Moore…Nathalie
Damien Carter…Nightclub Singer, also credited with writing
and performing “Just Hanging Out”
Mona Lisa Moon….Mai
Crew:
Director, screenplay author:
James Nguyen
laughable. With so many undesirable traits, you might wonder what compelled me to finish it. Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. Perhaps it’s a certain component in my DNA that makes me interested in these B Movies, you know, kind of like when you are driving along and you come upon a wreck. Obviously, it’s awful when someone has a wreck, and you really should drive along and keep traffic moving, but you don’t. You look. That’s kind of what this movie experience is like. It is so bad, you can’t look away. You almost have to keep looking, just to see what happens next.
The easiest feature to pick on is the visual effects. The birds of the aforementioned Birdemic are essentially animated sprites that look like copied and pasted GIF images on the screen. Seriously, the birds rarely do anything besides hover in the same spot on screen flapping their wings in perfect formation. Visual effects technician Yeung Chan put the entire budget into one or two shots of the birds hovering, and one shot of a close-up bird flying in, and they used the same clips repeatedly.
We could also take shots at the acting, but it’s a little like shooting fish in a barrel here. The principle character, Rod, played by Alan Bagh, recites his lines with the mumbling monotone of a middle school play actor. In one scene, he is giving a presentation to some venture capitalists about his revolutionary solar panels. At least I think he is discussing solar panels. He keeps referring to “Solarpuhlz”, but in the context of his speech, I’m thinking “solar panels”.
Having said all that and taken my easy swipes at the cast and crew, there are some qualities that kept me interested. The cast isn’t stellar, but they do the best they can with what they are given. Whitney Moore as Nathalie does embody a sort of innocent enthusiasm that makes her character at least likeable. Although she and the other actress, the under-used Mona Lisa Moon have “love scenes” with their boyfriends, they are not graphic. Director James Nguyen did not allow nudity in his film, so when the characters jump up out of bed, the girls are wearing bathing suits. It seemed a little odd wearing bathing suits to bed, but the movie earned points for me for not devolving into porn like many B-films do. If you are familiar with any number of network TV shows, the actors in this movie wear more than you would see on girls in prime-time TV.
The movie also has a very not-so-subtle environmental message. The birds attack because of global warming. This approach is never satisfactorily explained. The characters also encounter a bizarre mountaineer guy who watches over the forest like some kind of nature guru. The group also comes across the token science guy who lays out for them the global-warming scenario with enough science jargon that we basically have to accept that he is right.
The movie features a synthesized track that is not bad, but it’s not great. I was curious, so I read the credits at the end, because I have that kind of time. Many songs are attributed to Smartsound Software, although I only heard one piece of scoring about 10 seconds long, which is repeated ad infinitum. Also, there is some original live music played in the nightclub scene. Damien Carte plays “Nightclub Singer”, and is credited with writing and performing “Just Hanging Out”, which is admittedly catchy and stayed in my brain for the rest of the night.
Special makeup effects by John Garcia are pretty well-conceived. Now, when I say well-conceived, remember we’re talking about within the context of an independently financed movie by people who haven’t made many movies. We’re not talking about Avatar here. To be fair, I have step aside here and remind you that Avatar’s director James Cameron got his start working for Roger Cormen, who made movies not that different from Birdemic. OK, back to the makeup effects.
It seems that these new global-warming enhanced birds spit acid on people to gruesome effect. Actually, I didn’t know it was acid at first. I learned after reading another synopsis of the movie on the Internet Movie Database. In the film, when the birds fly by, victims fall over with acid on them, and it looks like they suffered from fatal bird droppings.
You might get the impression that I’m beating up on this movie, but that is not the case. The truth is, for all its faults, this is a unique gem. The cheap effects and amateur acting actually become part of the charm. What some people receive as a Z-grade movie experience, I actually admire. Here, a young group of film makers with more enthusiasm than talent put lots of effort into their labor of love, and completed their project without any help (translation: financial backing) from Hollywood studios. The director worked a full-time job as a software salesman while supporting this movie, shooting around his home of Half Moon Bay, California, spending his own money on the entire project, plus the rather unique marketing strategy.
Nguyen didn’t merit inclusion into any of the major film festivals, so he brought a van to them, covered with stuffed birds. Additionally, he handed out flyers thrown together with artwork from the movie, and a link to his web site. Unfortunately, in his haste he misspelled his own web site URL, so people who took his flyer home were looking for http://www.bidemic.com/, spelled without the ‘r’. Win for enthusiasm, Fail for talent.
All in all, the movie represents a sort of triumph. Nguyen may not be ready to take on Scorsese just yet, but he gritted his teeth for reportedly 5 years making this movie happen. He couldn’t have spent a whole lot making it, so it’s highly unlikely not to have turned a profit, with its growing popularity with a small but devoted cult following. Who knows, maybe in a few years, it will reach notoriety in a post-mortem kind of way, much like the infamous Troll 2. And if Birdemic 2 does show up at the Cineplex, I’ll get in line. If nothing else, it will be to see what happens next.
Moments that make you say, “What the...”
- At one point in the story, our hero is mugged by
a guy for his gasoline. The robber successfully acquires the gas, begins to
back away and is then quickly killed by the birds. The hero then just leaves.
Why? He could have gotten the can of gas back, plus another wickedly cool gun.
But he just leaves it all there.
- It’s probably just as well. The guns used by the
main characters have a bottomless clip, anyway.
- Speaking of guns that defy logic, our intrepid
heroes come across a busload of tourists who are being terrorized by the birds.
The heroes spray the bus with bullets to try to shoot the birds, missing 99% of
the time, while simultaneously not affecting the bus at all. - The guy then convinces the tourists to exit the
bus with him, and they all die immediately after getting out of the bus,
including the idiot with the gun. Worst rescue ever.
Final Verdict: An enjoyable movie, on 'B-Movie' terms...Three out of Four.
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