Project Terrible: Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2008)

The Internet has returned, o my brothers (and sistas), and life is ever the more glorious because of it. I fed my Law and Order addiction for a while and then finally settled down on this unseasonably nice December day to finish up my Project Terrible duties. I chose Craig from the blog Let's Get Out of Here as one of my torturers this time around, and was not disappointed in his terrible taste. Birdemic: Shock and Terror can be described with many an expletive as to its suckiness, however, I'll take the high road and just call it EPICALLY BAD.

It's probably easy to guess what this movie is about. A low-brow ripoff of Hitchcock's The Birds wherein we have to watch people fight stupidly against birds (in this case, eagles) who suddenly start to attack and kill humans for no reason. I was never even that big a fan of The Birds to begin with so already I was not excited for Birdemic. The fact that the film has garnered a cult status for being one of the worst movies ever made doesn't help in the least, but it does give me a lot to write about. 

But oh my gosh, where do I even start??? First off, there are no birds, and no shock or terror, at all for the first almost two-thirds of the movie. For 38 FUCKING MINUTES we have to watch some half-assed cheesy romance story between a software salesman named Rob and the beautiful girl that he meets (well, almost stalks) at a diner one day. Her name is Natalie and she's supposed to be a fashion model but the only place we see her getting her picture taken is at a one-hour photo place. Sounds legit. They go on dates, have awkward conversations, Natalie talks to her mom, Rob gets a lot of money from his job and starts a new company. Blah blah blah blah. Everything is just going so awesome in these people's lives and it's like we're watching the end of some romantic comedy instead of the beginning of a movie about killer birds. 

No fear, though! After 38 nauseating minutes, Rob and Natalie come across a dead (CGI) bird on the beach. Okay, let's get the killing started!.... What? No? We have to take a musical break first? 

Okay, I gotta admit that was really awesome. But back to the birds.

After Rob and Natalie wake up in their hotel room to the screeching of eagles and destruction of the city, they spend the next hour or so doing what any good character in a horror movie does, which is to drive around aimlessly, have no plan, and make plenty of stupid decisions along the way. The plot is completely nonsensical at every turn. Rob and Natalie meet up with another couple at the hotel, Ramsey and Becky, for a while they all do the noble thing like stopping along the road to save two kids whose parents were killed by the birds, but what is their real plan? Where are they going? And why the hell do they keep stopping to get out of the safety of their van? I can't count the number of times this group just starts wandering leisurely around outside - you know, WHERE THE KILLER BIRDS ARE - and oftentimes, they go wandering around so far from their van that they have to keep running back to it to get away from the birds. Argh. 

I could almost deal with the ridiculous plot and wooden acting if the execution of it all wasn't so amateur and annoying. Here's a rundown of the bad filmmaking techniques: horrible canted camera angles, awkward pauses while a shot edits from one person to another during a conversation, shots that linger on stupid things for too long, bad sound editing all the way through (sometimes no sound, sometimes too much background noise to hear dialogue, bad edits where background noise doesn't match up to previous shots), and of course, the intensely bad CGI birds, explosions and fires throughout. They were the worst. There is not a single live bird to be found in this movie and the CGI birds look like they were created by someone who has never seen a bird before in their life. We never see them from the front and they don't do anything that looks even remotely natural. I... I can't even describe it. The way they hover in the shot while Rob, Natalie, Ramsey, and Becky swat at them with coat hangers? How they never really flap their wings all that much but still stay in the air? It makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. And I'm pretty sure that at one point a bird actually explodes.

By the way, that coat hanger bit was the BEST. When they're preparing to leave the hotel room, Ramsey suggests that they find something to arm themselves with - and grabs a bunch of coat hangers from the closet. BAHAHAHA!! Really? And that's not even the best part - in the very next scene, Ramsey whips out a fucking machine gun and starts blasting away at the little feathered dudes. Like, where did you get a machine gun all of a sudden and why were coat hangers a better option before that?

You know what I couldn't help thinking of for most of this movie?

You betcha - DUCK HUNT. What a blast from the past. Seriously though, every time the birds are just sort of unnaturally hovering anywhere and Rob and Ramsey are shooting them, there are these awesomely bad shots of a bird getting hit and dropping out of the sky. I couldn't help but wonder where the giggling dog was. I would rather watch somebody play Duck Hunt nonstop for a week than watch Birdemic again. Mostly because Duck Hunt had far superior graphics. And I'm only partially joking there.

One of the most annoying things about the movie (besides, well, almost everything) is the whole tree-hugging and humans-are-evil mentality throughout. I love nature and all, and I know that humans are destroying the earth and each other with war and stuff, but I don't need some freaking Birdemic movie shoving it in my face. Rob is getting solar panels installed on his roof; Rob and Natalie go on a double date where they go see the movie An Inconvenient Truth; Natalie's friend Mai wears an Imagine Peace shirt and has a poster on her wall; Ramsey didn't like being a Marine because of "all the fucking killing in Iraq"; the groups meets a guy who lives in an actual treehouse (and stops to listen him go on about how the redwoods are his friends); the group conveniently meets an ornithologist who tries to explain that global warming is the cause for the birds' behavior, and on and on and on and on. I get it. Now shut up.

I'm done with this movie. There's no way to be kind about this: Birdemic is just awful, awful, awful. I could rant and rave for a lot longer about all the other ridiculous scenes and characters that we meet in the course of this pile of poop, but um... well, I'm hungry and it's taco night. You understand.