Thursday, March 10, 2011

Birdemic: This shit is bananas!

Let's get something straight right off the bat: I didn't expect this to be a good movie. It's called Birdemic, for god sake! In addition, I was already hearing tales of its awfulness on the Internets when I first decided to put the movie in my queue. I figured it would be some kind of made-for-Syy level dumbness like MegaPython vs. Gatoroid, but hopefully, more fun because it wasn't so self-aware.

Well, Birdemic is an awful movie, but it is awful in a way that makes those made-for-SyFy movies look like they were helmed by Scorsese. The acting is on par with a middle school stage productions the direction is disjointed and jerky, even the sound quality is jacked.

How do I explain the "plot"? Well, it's really this director James Nguyen's attempt to scare viewers into doing something about global warming. That's the overall message told in the most clumsily preachy fashion ever. He imparts this message to us by having the film's protagonists, Rod and Natalie, get attacked by exploding eagles and vultures at random (after 47 minutes of meandering). And there's a lot of talk about solar panels and green energy and An Inconvenient Truth is name-dropped here and there. Along the way, Rod and Natalie hook up with other survivors of this attack and try to stay one step ahead of the CGI threat.

That's the nuts and bolts, but you kinda have to see it to really KNOW how awful it all is. I mean, people fight off attacking birds with hangers! And, you might think it easy to kill a flock of attacking birds with a machine gun (I don't know guns. Was that an AK?), but actually, you will probably average only one bird for every 50 rounds and those kills might actually be attributed to your friend with the handgun who's shooting right next to you.

I hear tell, this movie can be improved in two ways: Rifftraxx and listening to the audio commentaries on the DVD. While I had some awestruck fun watching it, I couldn't sit through it again.