The art that stays with us, that moves us, that captivates, beguiles and enthralls us, is the kind that goes to extremes.
No comedy is as funny as when the action therein is taken to extremes of the farcical and absurd. Film noir depicts human beings in their most extreme states of moral decay, asking questions of us as to whether we can be decent people in an indecent world. Superheroes inspire by operating on the extreme side of nobility. Horror films thrive by confronting the extremes of evil, pain and death and forcing us to confront terrors deep and even instinctual within our conscious as well as our subconscious.
The cinematic phenomenons of late – whether one would evaluate these pictures as “good” or “bad” – are no exception. The extravagance of Avatar‘s fantasy is matched by the outrageousness of the financial and technical resources required to create it. The obsessive devotion of the Twi-Hards have made unlikely blockbusters of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.
There’s something compelling about extremes, perhaps because we tend to look at our world in terms of the day-to-day normalcy that drives so many of us to genre films in the first place. For a moments escape from the rational, the trade-off is suspension of disbelief; it is in the talent of gifted filmmakers that they can make us — even if only for two hours — accept that a man can fly, or the dead can walk the earth, or that the full moon can turn a man into a monster.
When this exchange pays off, we remember it for the rest of our lives, and great movies are made of these moments.
And yet, there’s another side to this extreme, a cackling, raving Mr. Hyde to quality’s Dr. Jekyll. The phrase most often used to describe this extreme is “So bad, it’s good.” However, that oft-used phrase is a gross over-simplification – not all “bad movies” are in some antithetical way, enjoyable. Films where little fun is derived from the experience of viewing them and where - instead of being glued to the screen, disbelieving at what is unfolding - you are numbed and pained by the senselessness the filmmaker is subjecting their audience to. Films like Monster A-Go-Go, Hobgoblins and the infamous Manos: The Hands of Fate, are films acceptable only with the blessed chaser of Mystery Science Theater.
More happily, “So bad it’s good,” that beloved contradiction in terms, applies to a unique few films that, either despite of or because of their obvious flaws, have become cult classics in their own regard.
Since his death in the late-1970′s, filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr. has become a legend for films whose earnestness and ambitions were woefully undeserved by incompetent execution. In films like 1955′s Bride of the Monster, and the immortal Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), the very laws of time and space do not apply. Day and night exist within one scene. Graveyards are constructed of cardboard, and paper plates from another world buzz Los Angeles on fishing wire. Lines such as “Future events such as these will effect you in the future…” are spoken stiffly, but with utter sincerity.
Wood has since been canonized as the “worst filmmaker who ever lived,” but what qualifies a film as “bad?” Wood’s films are surreal for being so shoddily conceived and produced, and in terms of objective film technique, truly do qualify as awful. Yet, who isn’t entertained by watching Plan 9 From Outer Space? And doesn’t that count for something?
Other films, such as Phil Tucker’s 1953 3-D opus Robot Monster, or Tom Graeff’s heartfelt and bizarre Teenagers from Outer Space (1959), don’t just flirt with the irrational, they embody it. These are films where plot coherence, believable performances, and technical craft don’t apply, and yet they’re defiantly entertaining. Perhaps because they were made by filmmakers who so believed in what they were doing, it didn’t matter that they were utterly unequipped to execute their visions.
Enter, Birdemic: Shock and Terror.
The interweb has been abuzz for almost a year about this one; whispers here and there of a phantom in the pop culture ether, something special waiting and lurking to pounce on an unsuspecting public. And the trailer! Subject of countless links and forwards, it’s the piece of film the prompt most, upon seeing it, to ask: “Is this a joke?”
People are clamoring for this show, but this is no Paranormal Activity style phenomenon. This might be something much more meaningful, as Birdemic is a bird of an entirely different feather. And the “why” of this story is as fascinating as the “how.”
Written, produced and directed by software salesman James Nguyen over a period of four years, shot and set in Northern California, and being described, officially, as “a romantic thriller partly inspired by Hitchcock’s The Birds,” Birdemic is getting a lot of attention and hype, with many keen on calling the film the new Worst Film of All Time. Famously, Nguyen generated hype for the film by crashing Park City during Sundance (which denied admission to his film), and driving up and down the street for a week in a van covered in fake dead birds, dried blood, and signs asking provocative questions like “Why did the eagles and vultures attacked?” [sic]. Pointedly, Entertainment Weekly recently described it as “the film which answers the question of what Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds would have looked like if it had been made not by Hollywood’s legendary Master of Suspense, but by a mid-level Silicon Valley software salesman.”
That’s not even the half of it.
Our story (let’s go with that term) begins with Rod (Alan Bagh), a mid-level salesman (of some kind…), who we meet as he drives through the opening credits. And then keeps driving. Ten minutes of driving under his belt, Rod stops into a small-town diner and spies Nathalie (lovely Whitney Moore), a former school mate whose modeling career (operating out of a photomat in a strip-mall) is just taking off. Intrigued, they exchange numbers (I think: their conversation moves outside and with the traffic and non-existent sound recording, it would be easier to hear their conversation in deep space) and begin a courtship (their first date is at a restaurant in a strip mall – is there some kind of theme here?).
Rod gets advice from his jocular friend (in one scene he plays basketball, and later can be counted on to make a humping gesture with little prompting), makes a killer $10 million sale at work, watches the news (apparently global warming is breaking up “sea ice” and really messing with the polar bears…) and gets a fairly aggressive sales pitch for solar panels. This scene alone counts for nine and half hours of screen time. Nathalie, meanwhile, models, gets advice from her “unsupportive” mom (who thrusts her hips much less often than Rod’s friend, thankfully) and goes dancing with Rod. (The dancing scene is a highlight – they’re the only ones in the club!)
Consummating their new found love in a nearby motel room (wait, they both have their own homes! Why in a hotel room?! I guess it’s just supposed to be kinda kinky), the two go to sleep, completely unprepared for what awaits them the next morning…
40 minutes into the film, the titular Birdemic begins. And… words fail to describe. Anyone who has seen the trailer has had a taste of this, but that doesn’t prepare one for the full visceral magnitude of the sequence. Static background plates are suddenly molested by CGI eagles and vultures who hover in place, before dive-bombing the landscape and, I kid you not, exploding on impact. Superimposed CGI fire and smoke out of a first generation PC game illustrate nature’s wrath, and our heroes are forced to arm themselves with coat hangers (!) and flee their motel to find sanctuary out on the road.
Along the way, Ron and Nathalie pick up couple Ramsey (Adam Sessa, who inexplicably has a machine gun with unlimited ammo stowed away in his mini van) and Becky (Catherine Batcha), as well as kids Tony and Susan (Colton Osborne and Janae Caster), and hit the road in search of… a place free of marauding, CGI birds, one supposes.
Their travels take them up the coast, and their adventures along the way have to be seen to be believed. A masked “bird expert” is on hand during a roadside picnic (!) to explain that the birds are attacking because their rather put-out by global warming. A “tree hugging” backwoods hippie too, blames mankind’s presumption and increasingly large carbon footprint on our feathered friends turning on us, in what is perhaps the film’s oddest aside (and, as one may gather, that’s really saying something in this picture). Stopping for supplies at a fully operational gas station (the effects of the Birdemic are scattershot, to say the least), our heroes bemoan that the current ecological crisis has caused gas prices to shoot up to $100 a gallon (one has to commend the attendant on his vigilance: in the event of a mass bird attack, I’d be the first to abandon my minimum wage job at a gas station!).
Oh, friends… the joys of Birdemic are many.
The nonsensical plot would make Luis Bunuel yearn for a little literalness. The first half of the film offers a pointless “love story” between two characters so ill-defined and without chemistry, that it makes it hard to complain that there’s no pay off to it, as once the bird attack begins, we’re off like lightning.
The camera work is scattered, as every attempt to juice up the proceedings with an interesting angle or some camera movement is bungled by trembling operating or blindingly bright lighting.
The sound design warbles between inaudible and deafening: dialogue anywhere but an interior is almost completely washed out by traffic, water, wind, etc., while the bird attacks are greeted with a cacophony of ambient screeching that literally had the entire screening holding their ears, like poor James Franciscus in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. “ONE AT A TIME!!!”
Then, of course, there’s the special effects, and man are they special. The CGI used to create both the birds and the effects of their attacks are so odd, so statically one-dimensional and false, that – coupled with the film’s time-and-space-defying editing – the entire film comes off as a surreal, fever-dream of Lynch-ian proportions. One cannot be sure one has actually seen what has just happened.
But before you can raise a drink and proclaim “It’s the end of the world!” the movie ends, on a shot that seemingly does notend. The entirety of the end credits play across one definingly silly shot of the birds in flight and our survivors (who will they be?) contemplating an uncertain future. The ending answers little, but does confirm for the viewer that they may have just experienced a miracle.
Congratulations must go to Severin Films, Birdemic‘s distributor, who should be very genuinely proud of their judgment; Birdemic: Shock and Terror could easily become a camp classic on par with the above mentioned Plan 9 From Outer Space.
I cannot recommend the experience of this picture enough; if the above films qualify as desirable viewing, than Birdemic: Shock and Terror is a cinematic milestone you won’t want to miss, as a new chapter in Z-movie ineptitude is written on the screen before your tear-filled eyes. Lovers of the bizarre, of the unaccountably senseless (like me!) will have a blast, as this is one picture very deserving of the growing phenomenon surrounding it.
Is Birdemic art? That depends on your definition. But it is as extreme as one can get.
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