This Film Exists Outside of God’s Grace

'Birdemic: Shock and Terror,' recapped and reviewed

Welcome back to the Crapterion Collection, an ongoing project that celebrates the best of the worst movies ever made. In our last installment, we recapped and reviewed ‘Bear,’ a movie about a bear. Today we are watching ‘Birdemic,’ a movie that is not about birds. To support me and enterprises like these, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Within each human creative endeavor both large and small exists at least a flickering ember of the divine. This fact is what draws me to awful films in the first place. Such slapdash projects, lacking the precision and elegance that mastery over craft provides, offer a raw, visceral glimpse at the smoldering Promethean flame at the center of man’s works. Cultivating an appreciation for bad art brings us into finer attunement with appreciation for art in general. 

Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, to cite a prominent example, has elicited the interest of millions as precisely this sort of curio. Beyond the ironic fandom and the cult classic status lies an incredibly earnest work reaching for the sublime. It topples over, falls down a flight of stairs, and breaks both its legs as it does so, yes, but it reaches nonetheless: at themes of infidelity and reckless passion. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!”

The Room is a movie made by a believer, by a man on fire, no less on fire than Michelangelo or Emily Dickinson or Prince or Pasolini or Ella Fitzgerald or the Dril Twitter account or any number of storied artists who’ve stolen from the light of Olympus and brought it back down to earth in the palms of their bare hands to share with us mortals. Wiseau is just untalented, which is fine. It’s legal. 

I can’t know for sure if it’s the quest for the sublime in a less alloyed form that draws others to The Room. For many, it’s simply a funny, silly movie to play in college. I get that. It’s funny and silly to me, too. What I’m more certain of, however, is that its overrepresentation in the “good bad movie” genre has sent many cinephiles on a treasure hunt for precious metals of similar value. This pursuit has brought us no shortage of fool’s gold. 

Birdemic: Shock and Terror, written and directed by James Nguyen and released in 2010, is one such hunk of rock that’s been offered up as raw ore, the stuff “good bad movies” are made of: Yes, you will have to work for it, but there’s something valuable, something interesting in there, if you can sieve it out. That’s part of the fun of the whole thing. 

Teddy and I had high hopes for Birdemic (Yes, Teddy now gets top billing in these reviews). After all, it had all the ingredients I look for in these kinds of movies. More, even. It had birds! Stilted dialogue, terrible effects, awkward sex scenes, these are all par for the course. What’s interesting to me about Birdemic, though, is what it lacks. It has no heart. There is no light to be found within its hour-and-a-half run time. I found this both intriguing and distressing.

What do I mean?

Ignore that there is not a bird to be found within the first 30 minutes of the movie, that it has a disinterest in the sky that borders on artistic intent—Jaws immediately thrusts us underwater, into danger, into the belly of the beast, but not here. Ignore that this is a clear homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, a film that opens with a title sequence featuring… birds (it does seem a bit intuitive). Forget the title Birdemic. Everything worth thinking about in this movie comes back to its cold, sinister aura. 

The entire project is afflicted by a disturbing apathy that infects everything from the actors to the oddly sterile North California setting to the CGI eagles who hover in mid-air with lazy, halfhearted little flaps of their wings. Even the opening credits feature the words “Supporting Casts” [sic] in a generic font. There is so little care, so little passion that it wraps back around and becomes interesting. The film itself is an homage to a Hitchcockian classic, and yet it holds neither reverence for it nor reference to it. It is like someone once told Nguyen, “this guy made a movie about killer birds” once, and Nguyen said, “cool.” 

Touching briefly on what can generously be called the plot, Rod is a guy, not a bird. He is a salesman. He makes big deals over the telephone. Specifically, he is a software salesman, though he later sells green tech, which is strange considering we also get a shot of a solar panel salesman coming to Rod’s house, and Rod has questions for him. Questions that someone who has never seen a solar panel in his life might have. He meets Nathalie, also not a bird. She is a budding young fashion model (they never say “model,” always “fashion model”) who just landed a cover with Victoria’s Secret. The two meet in a diner scene that borders on Lynchian, inasmuch as anything weird or off-putting gets called “Lynchian.”

After what feels like fifteen minutes of quietly riding along with Rod under a birdless sky in California, the waitress breaks the silence in an absolute jump scare of audio wherein she says, “Hi!” This holds the most excitement you’re going to get for the next hour or so. From this point until then, our job as viewers is to go on a bunch of dates with Rod and Nathalie. Perhaps we dream of birds as we do so, imagining them, praying for them, hoping they come to kill these people, or to kill us.

I appreciate how the movie turned me into a pull-string doll that only says “Birds?” There are no birds. There is barely a sky. There is only Rod and Nathalie, and us, witnessing their romance take flight, like a bird might do, if this were a world with birds in it. I sure do miss birds. I should go outside and look for some, just to remind myself that such things are possible.

I ought to mention that among the film’s sparse themes is, broadly speaking, “global warming.” People in this universe seem aware that global warming is happening, that it’s a darn shame, and it’s going to cause unforeseen problems. Keep that in mind, I guess. If you feel like it. It doesn’t really matter. Nothing does.

Let’s speed run through some stuff: Rod has a coworker with a girlfriend, who happens to be Nathalie’s bestie. That couple has sex in a hotel room, and it’s the same room Rod and Nathalie stay in later. Nathalie’s mom seems like a nice woman who in real life is probably super enthusiastic about her local theater community. I’m not not physically attracted to Rod. We meet quite a few people who never show up again, because by the time the birds do show up, our protagonists join forces with a random couple down the hall. Oh, and there are two children that tag along with them, starting at some point. I don’t remember when.

It’s the moment the killer birds show up that this movie truly becomes a film about “not showing you birds,” punishing its audience in an act of passionless sadism—Birdemic asks you to think about birds, then makes you wait for birds, then never gives you birds. These creatures are CGI monstrosities that look like they come to us from their native habitat of MS Paint. 

One thing I do earnestly love, though, is that the squad of Angry Birds™ is always composed of a bunch of golden eagles and one or two turkey vultures. Sometimes it’s all eagles, but every time a turkey vulture or two are included, it feels like a real treat. Good stuff. It needed, like, dozens of other choices like this going for it, but, you know. Applicable bird pun here, if any. Kill two with one stone, if you feel like it. 

Speaking of, these birds do their killing by slitting your throat. They swoop by, and once they’ve flown away, there’s a gash in the throat. I like to believe they are holding tiny box cutters or shanks in their talons. They can be killed, as most birds can, by being shot with guns. Nice piece of verisimilitude there. Our heroes start out defending themselves with coat hangers, but upgrade to automatic rifles within seconds. They manage to gun down several birds. Take that, you dumb birds. 

God. Alright, so the birds are all coo-coo I think because global warming heated up their silly little bird brains and they’re mad as hell now. They did find some kind of science guy to explain it, but the audio was bad, and I didn’t fully understand what he was saying. Perhaps it had to do with oil companies. I liked that he was wearing a surgical mask outdoors, though. Flatten the curve.

Sorry, I neglected to mention that the birds explode upon impact and spit acid, due to being mutated by global warming. Due to “the birdemic.” It’s kind of whatever. The movie quickly ends once our heroes get to a beach. The birds have suddenly decided to stop slitting throats. “Why did they stop attacking?” Nathalie asks as the birds fly away. No one answers her. The Wikipedia article for Birdemic claims we see doves flying at the end, but I’m pretty sure they remain the CGI eagles from before. 

So, that’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010). This film somehow has two sequels, which I will not be watching. We can now ask, if we dare, “What was that about?” I won’t completely discount the idea that Birdemic was trying to say something. It occasionally hints at this, and by “hints” I mean it whacks us over the head with it, as it does in the scene where a hippie in the woods delivers a speech about how man’s ceaseless greed and use of fossil fuels brought us to this point. 

There’s at least one idea in there worth diving into: What we understand to be nature, that green, amorphous entity that we have decided is distinct from ourselves has reserves of wrath that our misdeeds will unleash on us one day. 

This is a sentiment not so different from the one driving the current orca craze on Twitter, which imagines killer whales as righteous vigilantes seeking revenge on rich yachters. In a world where humans have established themselves as something superior to “animal life,” thus granting us permission to exploit the planet to accommodate our every whim, it can feel cathartic to anthropomorphize our victims and send them up as freedom fighters to root for. We are aware on some level that we live in a wicked society. This inspires guilt, and so our shadow selves crave our own destruction. We want a plucky member of the oppressed class to gum up the works. 

I have, weirdly, written about this sort of thing for the Washington Post before. The point, though, is that we harbor resentment for the detestable society we have built, even if that society establishes us at the top of the pecking order (ha, birds) over “the natural world.” Disaster movies are built on this sort of thing. We want to see it all burn, and be cleansed in the fires. 

Birdemic doesn’t really accomplish this. It’s not clear what pent up human emotion Birdemic was made to provide catharsis for. Returning to The Room: Johnny is betrayed by his one true love, Lisa, a woman he treated like a goddess. He did everything right! And he was still stabbed in the back! In the end, he takes his own life. It’s sappy, stupid, and, yes, how might the kids put it? “It’s giving incel.” 

But whomst amongst us hasn’t thought, after suffering a wound inflicted upon us by someone we love, “maybe I should just die?” In the throes of melodrama, has the thought of self-destructive vengeance never crossed your mind? They’ll be sorry they hurt me. The world will be sorry! It’s Shakespeare, kind of. If you squint. Don’t quote me on that.

It’s this lack of an emotional anything that gives Birdemic its disturbing feel. Teddy pointed this out to me, but the movie is entirely devoid of suspense. In one scene, where some characters are trapped in a bus (where, it must be said, they would be safe from certain airborne threats, like killer birds), they decide to exit that bus to make it to a different car (???) and are killed in the process. But there is no planning, no “alright, on the count of five…” There is no attempt to make you or the characters engage in any kind of dramatic tension. It is frictionless, despite its body count. 

Birdemic is an empty movie. Its wretched, non-Euclidean geometry is abhorred by God. I felt the cold breath of the void against my cheek watching it. I submit it to the Crapterion Collection the way an otherwise serious taxidermist might place a jarred shark with two heads on their shelves. There is no artistry here, only an innate peculiarity to it, which, as with human beings as well, is a pretty boring thing. Art ought to reach for something beyond. It makes things interesting. 

For now, I suppose I’ll continue seeking the high that Assassin 33 A.D. supplied me.