BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR – Turns Your Brain Into Pulp

Warning, BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR turns your brain into pulp. Really. These are the lowest circles of cinematic hell. Tommy Wiseau with his now-classic The Room or Neil Breen with the inspired Fateful Findings look down on it from the realms of more digestible sludge. The same goes for Samurai Cop – it too cuts itself off with its cheap sword from what is going on in Birdemic. We descend to a level so low that even those for whom trash cinema opens chakras and lights up dark nights may this time groan in pain.

Rod, a young software salesman, invites Nathalie, a future Victoria’s Secret model, on a date. She likes cats and hanging out with friends. He – talking about work and moving like a plank. After the first meeting, they keep dating under the sunny Californian sky. One morning they wake up in a world like a nightmare. Swarms of aggressive eagles appear over their town, murdering people for no clear reason. Staying in one place means death.

The amateurishness of this production gushes like blood from the elevator in The Shining. Each of the three bad titles I mentioned in the first paragraph has scenes or shots that could – on a quick, superficial assessment – resemble normal cinema. Not Birdemic. Here it is so bad and so cheap that the director drops below the level of wedding videos. Literally. Because can you imagine that in footage from such an event you would not be able to hear what the characters are saying? In Birdemic, in the beach date scene, the wind drowns out the dialogue.

In many other scenes, words appear first, and only then do the actors open their mouths. This is the result of atrocious sound editing. Not the only flaw of this production… And by the way, it is worth mentioning that the film essentially has no advantages… The director – a huge fan of Hitchcock, self-appointed master of romantic thrillers – wanted to pay tribute to The Birds with this horror. For ten thousand dollars, he gave the world a crude, stale, and so botched spectacle that the brain tries to deny what it sees.

Especially since the production comes from 2010. Despite that, the bloodthirsty eagles look like the cheapest gifs in the world, pasted onto the film with the subtlety of Leatherface. They are flat, one-dimensional, as if cut out of Paint. They assault our nerves with an artificially birdlike screech (which I will not forget anytime soon). The association of these gifs with old, clunky computer games is also appropriate.

The quality of execution of the element meant to evoke fear is so low that it makes one ask where and in what state of mind the director has been until now. Additionally, these birds explode upon contact with the ground and rarely flap their wings – yet they remain airborne. Sometimes they make sounds of older-type planes falling… Everything here is grotesquely artificial – the paint-like muzzle flash during gunshots, the paint-like forest fire and explosions.

If Mr. James Nguyen wanted to cynically make money by exploiting a certain demand for bad cinema, he disguises it fantastically, because the film looks like unmistakably unintentional trash. The cinematography is as lacking in atmosphere as it possibly can be – overexposed, underexposed, out of focus. Of every kind. Just not good. Editing seems not to have existed. Scenes drag on endlessly. So we experience the adventure of standing in traffic jams, driving a car, going somewhere, leaving somewhere, waiting for something, watching television, and a pumpkin festival.

The music sounds like it was designed by a weak, hand-cranked computer, at times inspired by John Williams. Against such a mangy background, the much-ridiculed The Room is – at least in technical terms – a masterpiece and a blockbuster. Nguyen says that 60 percent of a film is made by the actors. Fantastic. Except in his case, wood meets wood. In life, such situations sometimes create fire – from friction, if nothing else – but the characters of Birdemic are filled with cotton and sawdust, so listening to them, we press our hands to our foreheads.

Nguyen makes us watch them grow closer to each other for half the film, because – as is often the case in disaster cinema – the fireworks begin only after a solid setup. Whoever endures to the part filled with horror will witness a clash between people armed with coat hangers and wild birds.

It is noteworthy that the bird invasion begins after the couple becomes physically intimate, in accordance with a simple horror reading: either purity and idyll, or sex, and then a nightmare. However, I admit that I feel uneasy searching for a deeper meaning in something that itself is the bottom. Yet an ecological thread clearly resonates here. The film suggests that the birds’ aggression is the result of bird flu, which in turn grew out of global warming. Earlier, Rod installs solar panels at home and watches news about melting glaciers.

Not without significance is also the crude, probably Casio-made reworking of Imagine by John Lennon that returns like a boomerang, as well as the eccentric figure of the man from the forest – a mix of mystic and ecologist, hiding in the wilderness from catastrophe. During the screening, we also glimpse several times a web address leading to Yoko Ono’s website about world peace. But it is no surprise – Nguyen privately dreams of a global cessation of violence, and treats his film – based in 60 percent on his own experiences – as a warning sign for humanity. The ending of Birdemic remains enigmatic, stale, and stretched into a long shot worthy of more than one yawn.

This is worse than all the boob-eating sharks or the ghosts of those sharks. When an almost zero budget meets zero talent, Birdemic happens. The question remains whether anyone can get from it something that would oscillate within registers close to pleasure. I will answer only for myself. Yes, I had a good time watching the bird scenes; several times they squeezed out laughter I could not stop. I reacted the same way to some sequences involving the hyper-stiff characters. Mixed impressions. A hypnotically bad and deeply indigestible production at the same time.

I missed a human element in it. The protagonist of The Room, the cop from Samurai Cop, or (oh my God, I am actually writing this!) even the character played by the narcissistic and boorish Neil Breen in Fateful Findings – all of them somehow pulled those dirty, heavy wagons full of sinewy narrative meat. They pulled because they had – more or less – something human in them. Birdemic loses that element in favor of an image of the feelings of two puppets straight out of a reality show. Nevertheless, lovers of extremes should confront a title featuring the least frightening monsters in the world.

It turned out, moreover, that pop culture is capable of absorbing even something this squalid. Not only is a sequel to the film already ready (and Nguyen dreams of a series in the vein of Terminator, preferably with a 3D installment), but you can also buy or order the flying heroes of Birdemic on a mug or a T-shirt. What a trip.