2008
Directed by James Nguyen
Natural Horror, Thriller.
If you know me well or you have followed my reviews for a while, you'll know that I have a sick obsession when it comes to films that are so bad they are good, or "goofs" as I like to call them. I count cult classics such as The Room, Troll 2 and Undefeatable as some of the most entertaining films out there! Films that I can watch over and over again and appreciate more than the latest Oscar winner!
Having seen a few clips on YouTube and read about Birdemic: Shock & Terror, I knew that this film would be right up my street. Birdemic just received a UK Blu-Ray release and is actually being sold in shops, which is wonderful and frightening in equal measures! But I couldn't resist, and it is jam packed with special features too!
In case you don't know about Birdemic, it is considered to be one of the worst films ever made. It looks like a student made this film to submit for a college course, and even then I doubt they would have landed a passing grade! The film is basically a rip off of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and sees a bunch of rogue birds attack people at a seaside US town for almost no explainable reason! But the film is most famous for it's extremely low quality. It looks like it could easily have been filmed on a cheap handheld camera or even an I-Phone, and the editing is incredibly basic, and could have easily been done in under a week on Windows Movie Maker. The acting is lower than Porno levels, and somehow the lead actor happens to be the worst of the lot, expressing absolutely no emotion or concern even during the most "tense" scenes. At least the leading lady is somewhat competent, but not enough to make a career out of acting. The editing is beyond terrible, the sound mixing is all over the place, with some scenes being battered by the sound of the wind, making the dialogue near inaudible. Scenes cut to the next one without any rhyme of rhythm and the infamous "special effects" look like 2 second looped gifs of birds have been copy and pasted onto the screen! Whenever you hear the heroes of the film shooting their guns at the birds, cheap stock sound effects are used and the toy prop guns don't even look real or like they are actually firing anything. The entire soundtrack is cheap and sounds like it has been picked from a stock library. Despite being made in 2008, Hitchcock's The Birds, that was made in 1963, looks far more accomplished in every technical aspect.
The actual plot of the film is very, very lopsided. The first half is very slow and uninteresting. We see our forgettable leading man go to work and succeed in a big sales pitch, and go on a date with the leading lady, winning her charms despite his inability to express an emotion or say anything interesting or charming. I guess the script says they like each other, so the audience just has to go with it! The film is padded out with inane scenes of the leading man playing basketball with his friend, and the leading lady securing a modelling contract. The only chuckles to be had during the first half of the film are the first few times you see the terrible acting and the abrupt editing, but even this soon becomes a bore. There is a pretty comical scene where they go on a date at a bar, and a singer is badly lip syncing to a cheesy R&B song. The scene goes on for like 5 minutes and goes nowhere!
About half way through, the film makes an incredible shift in tone completely out of nowhere. All of sudden the screen is filled with poorly animated birds, whose shits are capable of blowing up buildings below. The characters humourously try to fend off the birds with coathangers. The film does start to become more entertaining, funny and silly during the last half, but it is such a slog making it upto this point. Even though Tommy Wiseau's immortal cult classic The Room is nearly as bad in quality, and is also full of go nowhere scenes, that film has a hypnotic atmosphere to it that makes it captivating for the entire length. Mainly because of Tommy Wiseau's enigmatic screen presence. Birdemic doesn't have that quality though, it is just BAD. And really boring. The laughs are very few and far between. One of the few saving graces of the film is that it comically crams in as many pro-environmental messages as it possible can, and not subtly. We see background posters and even characters wearing shirts advertising Yoko Ono's "Imagine Peace" website. The reason for the birds attacking is blamed on global warming, with a random scene where a "scientist" talks on and on about the dangers of global warming. At least the director has some sort of moral code, but if only he had found a better way to make his points!
I kind of feel bad that this film had a cinema release and even a Blu-Ray release, because it offers everything that is terrible and amateurish in film making, but fails to be remotely entertaining and interesting for most of its duration. It's not a so bad it's funny kind of film, it's just bad and painfully dull. If you watch a 3 minute clip of the film on YouTube, then that is enough, don't fool yourself into thinking the full film must be full of comedy gold like I did, because it isn't! I've seen non-film makers post up YouTube videos that had a better sense of editing and basic film making than this film has. I can honestly say I have made videos of better quality than Birdemic, and I do not consider myself a film maker! The whole film seems like a cruel joke, and the Blu-Ray release just extends that bad taste even further! Avoid this one and watch The Room or Troll 2 instead! 1/10.
Having seen a few clips on YouTube and read about Birdemic: Shock & Terror, I knew that this film would be right up my street. Birdemic just received a UK Blu-Ray release and is actually being sold in shops, which is wonderful and frightening in equal measures! But I couldn't resist, and it is jam packed with special features too!
In case you don't know about Birdemic, it is considered to be one of the worst films ever made. It looks like a student made this film to submit for a college course, and even then I doubt they would have landed a passing grade! The film is basically a rip off of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and sees a bunch of rogue birds attack people at a seaside US town for almost no explainable reason! But the film is most famous for it's extremely low quality. It looks like it could easily have been filmed on a cheap handheld camera or even an I-Phone, and the editing is incredibly basic, and could have easily been done in under a week on Windows Movie Maker. The acting is lower than Porno levels, and somehow the lead actor happens to be the worst of the lot, expressing absolutely no emotion or concern even during the most "tense" scenes. At least the leading lady is somewhat competent, but not enough to make a career out of acting. The editing is beyond terrible, the sound mixing is all over the place, with some scenes being battered by the sound of the wind, making the dialogue near inaudible. Scenes cut to the next one without any rhyme of rhythm and the infamous "special effects" look like 2 second looped gifs of birds have been copy and pasted onto the screen! Whenever you hear the heroes of the film shooting their guns at the birds, cheap stock sound effects are used and the toy prop guns don't even look real or like they are actually firing anything. The entire soundtrack is cheap and sounds like it has been picked from a stock library. Despite being made in 2008, Hitchcock's The Birds, that was made in 1963, looks far more accomplished in every technical aspect.
The actual plot of the film is very, very lopsided. The first half is very slow and uninteresting. We see our forgettable leading man go to work and succeed in a big sales pitch, and go on a date with the leading lady, winning her charms despite his inability to express an emotion or say anything interesting or charming. I guess the script says they like each other, so the audience just has to go with it! The film is padded out with inane scenes of the leading man playing basketball with his friend, and the leading lady securing a modelling contract. The only chuckles to be had during the first half of the film are the first few times you see the terrible acting and the abrupt editing, but even this soon becomes a bore. There is a pretty comical scene where they go on a date at a bar, and a singer is badly lip syncing to a cheesy R&B song. The scene goes on for like 5 minutes and goes nowhere!
About half way through, the film makes an incredible shift in tone completely out of nowhere. All of sudden the screen is filled with poorly animated birds, whose shits are capable of blowing up buildings below. The characters humourously try to fend off the birds with coathangers. The film does start to become more entertaining, funny and silly during the last half, but it is such a slog making it upto this point. Even though Tommy Wiseau's immortal cult classic The Room is nearly as bad in quality, and is also full of go nowhere scenes, that film has a hypnotic atmosphere to it that makes it captivating for the entire length. Mainly because of Tommy Wiseau's enigmatic screen presence. Birdemic doesn't have that quality though, it is just BAD. And really boring. The laughs are very few and far between. One of the few saving graces of the film is that it comically crams in as many pro-environmental messages as it possible can, and not subtly. We see background posters and even characters wearing shirts advertising Yoko Ono's "Imagine Peace" website. The reason for the birds attacking is blamed on global warming, with a random scene where a "scientist" talks on and on about the dangers of global warming. At least the director has some sort of moral code, but if only he had found a better way to make his points!
I kind of feel bad that this film had a cinema release and even a Blu-Ray release, because it offers everything that is terrible and amateurish in film making, but fails to be remotely entertaining and interesting for most of its duration. It's not a so bad it's funny kind of film, it's just bad and painfully dull. If you watch a 3 minute clip of the film on YouTube, then that is enough, don't fool yourself into thinking the full film must be full of comedy gold like I did, because it isn't! I've seen non-film makers post up YouTube videos that had a better sense of editing and basic film making than this film has. I can honestly say I have made videos of better quality than Birdemic, and I do not consider myself a film maker! The whole film seems like a cruel joke, and the Blu-Ray release just extends that bad taste even further! Avoid this one and watch The Room or Troll 2 instead! 1/10.
No comments:
Post a Comment