Driving & Parking - BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR (2006)

There is a very specific kind of film, gestated in a mind of strangeness, birthed in trouble and raised in utter confusion, that occasionally elevates itself to greatness. THE ROOM (2001) is the king of them all--not since PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) has the world seen such logic-breaking incompetence married with what should have been competence. TROLL II (1990) is another great example. Both have an utterly weird director, tons of freaky creative choices, and a backstory of broad incompetence. "No mud, no lotus", after all; the strangest ground can suddenly bloom the most glorious flowers.

And yet, before we get too excited and run off to dig up our student-made films, let's remember that we're still playing the law of averages here! The average amateur film is pretty bad. The best amateur films are maybe enticing. The worst are 100% unwatchable. Where BIRDEMIC (2001) actually lands on that spectrum is not only endlessly debatable, but endlessly debated.

"Endlessly foul." - Jennie Punter, Globe & Mail, 2010. 0/4 rating

"It is possible that 'Birdemic: Shock and Terror' is one of the worst films ever made ... and that is precisely why it will not be forgotten." - Sebastian Zavala Kahn, Me Gusta El Cine, 2020. 0.5/5 rating

"Bird-brained thriller sets a new standard for zero-budget hilarity." - Corey Hall, Metro Times, 2010. F rating

"Nguyen's DIY-fingerprints are on every frame. Like The Room, it's the antidote to mass culture – a singular auteur with a dream." - Amy Nicholson, Boxoffice Magazine, 2010. 3/5 rating

"Birdemic appears to be completely sincere, an attempt by Nguyen to make a serious and moving work of art. So what if it moves us to tears with laughter?" - Brian Holcomb, CinemaBlend, 2011. 5/5 rating

It's even hard to describe the genre and background of this hallucination of a film, but I'll try.

Behind The Birdemic

What happens when "Third-Party America" takes a big drink of Alfred Hitchcock's THE BIRDS and AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH? It's BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR, baby!

Many years ago, a lad born in Danang, Vietnam– living in the US with his parents since age 9– watched THE BIRDS (1963) and VERTIGO (1958) for the first time. Like my generation, who kept bumping into ARACHNOPHOBIA (1990) on tv, there was something about THE BIRDS that kept it in rotation among Gen-X kids. This kid, James Nguyen, just couldn't stop watching it.

He watched these films in particular many times throughout his early years, but never quite imagined he'd become a filmmaker himself. He got a job in Silicon Valley as a software salesman. At one point, in 1999, he picked up a video camera for the first time, for no recorded reason. After messing about for a few years, he made a whole movie: the romance JULIE AND JACK (2003), then REPLICA (2005), his answer to VERTIGO.

Just a few years later, Al Gore put out a documentary film version of his famous slideshow on climate collapse, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (2006). One can only imagine that the effect on Nguyen, now 40, was electric. He had been living in the US for 31 years, going from Silicon Valley salesman to self-funded director of films no one wanted to see or buy. Earlier in the same year, Nguyen was already starting to pour (relatively small amounts of) money into the production of BIRDEMIC, which would take up his time for the next four years. It was shot on weekends using his own money from his day job.

Let's pause here to consider the atmosphere. It's 2006. Nguyen is a grown adult, age 40, a first-gen American living in California, with years of experience in the world of software sales and the fringes of tech, American schools, driving, restaurants, TV– he probably watched The Flintstones as a kid. Did he try to explain Captain Caveman to his immigrant parents? Did he argue with them about the future of computers, that software would surely change everything? Did he constantly have Hitchcock's wide white skies and cyclonic clouds of black birds circulating in his head, cawing and screeching endlessly through his teenage dreams?

I believe his early film attempts, shot as they were basically on zero budget, were a run-up to the starting line. I wonder if Nguyen feels the same. I wonder if, at age 40, he felt like he was just on the cusp of something; waiting for inspiration, or love, or war, or just the right thing to spark his masterpiece. Something he could point to in his life, to say, "This was my passion. I was made for this."

I imagine, for Nguyen, Al Gore's documentary was the match dropped into kerosene.

By all accounts, Nguyen began working on BIRDEMIC after being inspired by a relaxing vacation in Half Moon Bay, CA. Maybe it was wandering the beaches and state parks, or the fisherman's market at the harbor, but he found some kind of affection and comfort in this coastal city. If you watch BIRDEMIC with the thought that it might have broken every production rule in the book and been shot roughly in scene viewing order, you can feel a sort of relaxed, stunted, hopeful romance in the opening scenes. There are a lot of shots of driving and parking (BIRDEMIC is one of the films that gave this blog its title!) filling out all the pesky plot and dialogue, all with a laid-back pace like a middle-aged man driving 10mph below the speed limit on a California vacation.

A whole delightful scene takes place at a Farmers & Art Market, where our two main characters, Rod and Nathalie, wander hand-in-hand through a very real market full of very real, very not-paid citizens. They smile at amateur paintings, point at large pumpkins, and generally just look like there is nowhere else they'd rather be.

If you've had the satisfaction of growing up in a crappy little town with crappy local artists, you know that the only people who sincerely enjoy such events are tourists, toddlers and dogs. Nguyen's weird directorial choice of having two "intelligent, attractive" young American people going on a hot date to a craft fair exposes two possibilities:

1. He "Shot the Rodeo".
2. This man has literally never talked to a young American woman in his life.

So with all this happy, relaxing wandering around in Half Moon Bay, where do the titular birds come in?

Well, suddenly, they're AAAAA HANGING IN MID-AIR THEY'RE CLIP ART AND THE WINGS ARE SLIGHTLY BENDING AND SCREE! SCREE! SCREE! OH GOD!! WHAT DO THEY WANT?! No, really, what do they want? Why are they here? Is that supposed to be an eagle? Is this possibly a joke? What even is the plot here??

Note: This segment contains spoilers. However, I don't think there's any real way to spoil the surprise of Birdemic.

A stiff, wooden American lad, Rod, looking like Pinocchio on his first day in Human World, is a software salesman for a startup called NCT Software. In fact, he's a great sales guy! Because of his outgoing and energetic personality! One jolly day, after slowly driving and parking in Half Moon Bay, CA, he stumbles upon his old classmate Nathalie. Their meet-cute is more of a meat-cringe as Rod imposes himself on this girl who clearly just wants to get away from this aggressively unfashionable wooden man, but she agrees to meet him for dinner at a local Chinese buffet. In an apparently unrelated scene, Rod agrees to buy solar panels (it's pronounced "slrpnl", for you people not in The Biz) from a door-to-door salesman.

At dinner, Nathalie reveals that she is a model, but her mom would rather she go into real estate. Rod reacts mildly to this and talks about himself for a while.

It is already apparent that Rod is Nguyen's Mary Sue in this tale. He explains that he started off as a software engineer, but it wasn't exciting enough for his 'personality', so he got into sales.

Despite it being nearly impossible to get a flattering screenshot of this guy who tucks his polo shirt into his chinos, Nathalie is totally into it, so they wander about stiffly arm in arm and fall in love.

Not long after all this loving is going on, The Board of Directors at NCT announces that NCT Software has been bought by Oracle Corporation for 1 billion dollars! Everyone claps for quite a long time (I adore the recycled, looped footage of this scene) and Rod decides now is the time to cash out his stock options, slurring happily, "Yeah, I earned it, all those big deals I did with NCT, and millions in dollars of reveyus and sales. Think I'm go a break. Early retirement." In fact, he opens his very own startup: Mass Solar Slrpnls! Within 20 seconds he is fully funded. Everything is coming up roses for Rod, so to relieve some tension, there's more driving and parking immediately following.

Rod and Nathalie enjoy the Art & Pumpkin Festival, take a walk on the beach, and Rod tells his lady the good news.

To celebrate, they go to a bar/club/roadhouse where this poor guy is singing to an utterly empty room until Rod and Nathalie show up to dance right in front of him. To their credit, they do wobble awkwardly the entire time, and if you aren't still singing hangin out, hangin out... hangin out with my family... after watching this, you aren't havin' yourself a party!

This is enough teasing for Nathalie who just can't get down to her Victoria's Secret sponsored undies fast enough, and they finally get to kiss in a grotty hotel room. Nguyen breathes a sigh of relief. He's secured his happiness, his love, his fortune, his future wife. Wait, I mean Rod! Rod, not Nguyen!

Around the 45-minute mark, halfway through the film, the director abruptly decides that it's time for a Birdemic. If you were kind of dozing off, your ASS gets KICKED AWAKE by a shit ton of clip art eagles starting fires all over California!

Rod and Nathalie meet up with another couple, Becky and Ramsey, who have convenient guns, and fight their way out of the hotel room (mostly brandishing clothes hangers) and jump into a car for more driving and parking, trying to stay ahead of the mass of murderous birds. The birds not only drop bombs and start localized fires, but also evolve to spit or poop acid that makes people fall down and die!

At one roadside location, Nathalie discovers two small kids hiding under a van, and decides to just keep them because their parents are dead.

Nathalie is also given a pistol, and she takes pot shots at the birds in the sky as the van un-parks, using the classic "thrust the gun at what you want to shoot" method that seems to work exceptionally well against these birds.

Someone notes "They're going after cars!" Eventually Becky and Ramsey succumb to the Birdemic, leaving Rod and Nathalie as ad-hoc parents to these two kids who accept them immediately. I guess in a birdemic beggars can't be choosers.

After some driving (don't worry, we get to see it all!) our characters meet up with the most charismatic and delightful side-character in the whole film: Tom Hill, who pops up out of the ground with a crazy-eyed look capped with a Samurai Cop wig, and starts ranting about bark beetles and global warming.

The Rod Family then drives down to the beach, where they begin, without dialogue, to fish for their dinner, cook it awkwardly on the beach (Rod plops the whole fish into a pot of water while Nathalie drops some seaweed in) over a hot plate. But with no warning, the birds show up again. Rod shoots one...

And this is the last straw for the birds, who all depart quietly. It appears that the birds have decided to give humanity a chance to turn it all around. Rod, Nathalie and the kids that aren't theirs stand on the shore of the sea, listening to the swell of triumphant and heartfelt orchestral music, watching the birds float away. It takes a while, because they're clip art. Roll credits.

Made For Midnight Screenings

This paragraph from Wikipedia so perfectly encapsulates the weird Outsider Art feel of this film, I have to include it:

"In January 2009, Nguyen traveled to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah to promote the film freelance, handing out flyers to passers-by from his van, adorned with stuffed birds and misspelled paper signs that read "BIDEMIC.COM" and "WHY DID THE EAGLES AND VULTURES ATTACKED?", and renting out a local bar to screen the film."

By 2009 and 2010, horror movie review websites like Bloody Disgusting had caught wind of BIRDEMIC and sponsored its LA premiere on Feb. 27, 2010 at the Silent Movie Theatre, hosted by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of "Tim & Eric". By this sentence alone you will detect that the public had already taken BIRDEMIC under its wing as a shitty but hilarious midnight movie, firmly slotted into Potential Cult Classic. The relentlessly mumbling Rod (Alan Bagh), the just-too-good-for-this-film Nathalie (Whitney Moore), the mad-eyed Tree Hugger (Stephen Gustavson), the empty dance club, the doofy and amateurish performances from everyone else; all combined with special effects that had audiences pissing their pants with laughter. This was a movie made for the bad movie fans.

The first watch of BIRDEMIC is like a confusing hallucination, but not like THE CELL's artistic bombardment of colors and slow-mo paintings. It's like eating an edible, forgetting you ate it, and then having dinner with your extended family. 👀 Is this really happening? How long has this been going on? Why can't I understand anything anyone is saying? Why does everyone move like they don't know what to do with their arms? Where... am I?

But what actually elevates this film and captured so much attention? I think the secret sauce is not the poor audio, the atrocious acting, the variable film quality, the incoherent script, or the CD-ROM style special effects. I think it's James Nguyen himself. You can't fake sincerity, and this film drips with it. This guy is putting himself right into his film, exactly how he wants us to see his mind: innocent, successful, romantic, heroic, resourceful, a guy who can get a Victoria's Secret model and sell his company for millions of bucks just by being a decent guy who cares about the environment.

Nguyen has envisioned a world where asking investors to invest in a company that wants to do the right thing will simply work; where watching AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH will convince people to immediately buy an electric car. In this movie, the earth fights back by sending dragons (essentially) against humanity, to fight back against pollution by simply killing everyone until they are sorry. Humans who are environmentally aware are spared the rage of the earth, and Rod and Nathalie are permitted to escape as a perfect family: a young couple with two children plucked from the ground.

This kind of naivete has charm, but being wrapped as it is in utter garbage production makes it come off as ignorant and misguided. And that tension between childlike sincerity and the total delusion of believing this film will be taken seriously, yields us a thick-cut steak of Great Bad Movie.

If you haven't seen it, but are familiar with Mystery Science Theater 3000, I would actually recommend watching it with RiffTrax first. Mike, Bill, and Kevin absolutely outdid themselves with this MST3K treatment and I've watched it more times than I really care to admit.

Grab your coat hangers, grab your family, and buckle up for a bad movie that's so sincere, so bad, and so weird it's part of the great pantheon of modern Bad Movies. SCREE! SCREE! SCREE!

• Birdemic is currently available to watch for free on Tubi here.

Personal rating: 10/10. One of the greats. Jussst Hangin out, Hangin out...

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This article was written by a real human without any use of AI.