Review of Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) by Dylan N — 30 Jul 2011

Imagine if you will a commercial for a small local business pops on the tv; it's painfully cheap in the sense the actors are not actors, just friends or family of said small business owners, who simply just state their lines almost as if they are unable to emote at all; the director and editor have never directed or edited in their lives and just cut and paste film together without taking things such as audio quality and lighting into consideration. Now imagine, if you still have any desire to, that an entire film was made this way, for under $10,000 and most of THAT money went to marketing the film. That should give you a pretty good idea of how Birdemic: Shock and Terror looks and feels.

That being said, it's incredibly painful to watch, yet somehow you find yourself being a glutton for punishment; begging to see if it can possibly get worse and boy does it.

The first 5 minutes of the film is the main character driving his car through the country side. Did I mention 5 minutes? Yes, it takes that long for anything else to happen. In this scene he doesn't talk to anyone, doesn't rock out to a song on the radio. He simply stares forward and drives and we get a few different angles of the car as it slowly cruises along.

Thus goes for nearly every scene in the film; it goes on way too long and is thus made unbearably awkward. In one such awkward scene, where I quite literally rolled around on the floor laughing, our hero and his super model girlfriend dance at a seemingly empty Irish bar. Empty aside from a lone black man on stage singing some sort of disco song about "getting down, getting down with my family, having ourselves a party!" They do stereotypical "white people" dance moves for the WHOLE length of the song, all the while said black man's lips rarely sync up with the lyrics.

Perhaps what got me the most is there is no hint at all about killer birds until 50 minutes into the film and, when they are introduced into the film... well, let's just say you've seen better CGI in 1993.

I honestly thoroughly enjoyed how insanely bad this movie was. My only real complaint is how drawn out the movie gets after the killer birds come into play; it's almost the same scene over and over again and some of the stupid charm gets lost along the way. That and the ending is mind bogglingly lame.

Really stoked to see what James Nguyen brings to the table later this year with Birdemic 2: Resurrection 3D. Yes, that is the actual title.