A Little-Late Film Review: Birdemic: Shock and Terror - PART 2!

I pick up where I left off…  This movie is just too bad to give just one article.  Here is where the movie goes further off the rails:

The acting in this movie makes Tommy Wisseu’s in the Room look like an Oscar-worthy performance.  The inflections are all wrong, the emotions, out of place.  One particularly bad performance belongs to a young girl who’s family is ornithologically slaughtered.  So, in one shot she’s crying, scared and missing her family, in the next she’s smiling in the back seat, playing a PSP, all in the span of about three minutes.  Aside form the girl’s performance, the leads are just as bad, mumbling and running words on, speeding up and slowing down their rate of speech in the middle of conversations and showing no emotion at all despite the fact that the world is under attack. 

There are so many other glaring issues with the film, starting with the picture quality, that make it qualify to be one of the worst films ever made.  The film quality changes from scene to scene, going from camera-phone quality in some shots, to studio-lit life insurance-commercial-quality others, not just from scene-to-scene, but from camera-to-camera.




Then there’s the audio.  I can assure you, no boom-mics were harmed (or even used for that matter) in the making of this film.  The mix is way off, the ambiance overpowers the voice track, and the fact that most of the actors mumble through their lines doesn’t help.  Also, like with the video quality, the audio quality changes from shot to shot as well, and sometimes does not start playing until after the video cuts to the next scene, leaving awkward gaps of silence at the start of cuts in the middle of the film‘s dialogue.

The special effects, if you want to call them that, involve animated sprites of birds super-imposed onto the screen with cheesy special effects in the form of pre-fabricated explosions and lights placed over buildings.  The scenes of the bird attacks, which actually take up only a fraction of the film, are so hilariously bad that they will actually make you forget you aren’t watching a comedy.  I literally laughed so hard it made my head hurt. 

So.  After all that, what is my verdict for Birdemic?  It’s hard to say.  If you like to watch bad movies and laugh at them, this one is for you.  It is filled with laughable moments and are just designed to be mocked.  That said, this movie is very, very bad.  If you aren’t tolerant of the So-Bad-That-It’s-Good genre, this will be a painful experience for you.  The acting is terrible, the cinematography is as though the cameraman has Tourette Syndrome, the dialogue is muffled and there is a great deal of background distortion making the things very noisy.  Also, the heavy-handed, albeit absurd, environmental message will make this one too much for some.  Birdemic is not bad in the way Norbit is bad.  It is taking itself very, very seriously, and that makes it funny.  So, if you are looking for a few unintentional laughs (or “bad laughs” as their called), this is one you have to see to believe.