A film introduced to the wider world by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, a basic plot synopsis would be... well, all you need to know is that it starts as a terrible romantic comedy about a young couple in love and abruptly shifts at the middle to a terrible B-action movie about killer birds with a green agenda. It's sort of a homage to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, only really badly made.It was shown at a couple festivals in 2008 and 2009, and then had a small theatrical run in 2010. It was released on DVD and Blu-Ray in February 2011. Since its premiere it's been Snark Baitforaboutallofthe many usualsuspects and was featured as the RiffTrax Live Halloween 2012 show.A sequel, Birdemic II: Resurrection has been released. In 3D! And yes, Birdemic 2 is as terrible as the first movie.
This film provides examples of:
Acting Unnatural: An unintentional example - early in the movie, the actor who plays Rod couldn't walk naturally on camera and ends up looking like he's made of wood.
At the end of the film, Rod resembles Frankenstein in both facial expression and walking.
Rick thinks "a day without sex is a day wasted." (This character was reused from the other film by Nguyen, Julie And Jack.)
Nathalie also mentions more than once that Rod is different from all the other guys she's dated, who were only into her for the sex. So apparently All Men Are Perverts, Except Rod. Even then, it's a Broken Aesop: Rod tries to invite himself in to Nathalie's apartment after their first date. Though, it might be argued that Rod's intents were virtuous, and Nathalie didn't want to tempt herself.
Aluminum Christmas Trees: In California, all cars can be converted to hybrid or full electric. However, it's expensive. So Rod's hybrid Ford Mustang was plausible (if missing the point of a muscle car like a Mustang).
Artistic License - Biology: Did you know eagles could hover in midair like hummingbirds? According to Word Of God "Global warming has caused them to be mutant, toxic, and flammable. That's why, when they take a kamikaze drive, they explode, and when they drop bird fluid on some of the cast, they get burned." Genetics and evolution don't work that way outside of X-Men.
To say nothing of the spontaneous combustion. Even bombardier beetles don't explode when falling.
And according to the sequel, the fossils of the La Brea Tar Pits have intact blood vessels and DNA. Who knew?
A-Team Firing: The heroes, including a supposed soldier, fire hundreds of rounds at birds and rarely hit any of them.
Author Appeal: Green Tech - to the point of giving Rod a hybrid Ford Mustang.
Author Avatar: The protagonist of this (and those of the director's other two films) are tech salesmen. Guess what profession the director used to work in? The protagonist attracts a Victoria's Secret model by creepily stalking her.
Birdemic 2 has a suspiciously out of place screenwriter of Asian descent who wants to write a movie about killer birds attacking Hollywood. The movie abruptly ends when he dies.
Author Filibuster: In the middle of the birdemic, characters are introduced solely to deliver a speech about how global warming will kill us all, then leave never to return.
Bottomless Magazines: Not once do you see Rod or Ramsey reloading their weapons, and they fire a truly psychotic number of rounds at the birds. Just dozens and dozens of bullets without cease.
This is perhaps even more ridiculous in the sequel, as eventually almost everyone in the band of survivors has a gun of some sort, and again they all fire over and over and over without ever once needing to reload.
Bus Full of Innocents: A bus full of people are trapped by birds. The heroes "rescue" them.
Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: After the birds attack, Nathalie doesn't even mention her mother, much less the fact that she's probably dead.
Her mother turns up in the sequel, and shows up for an extremely random, awkward moment and then disappears and is never mentioned again afterwards. Much like in the first movie.
Contrived Coincidence: It turns out Rod's best friend and Nathalie's best friend are dating. This has absolutely nothing to do with how they meet.
Corpsing: Whitney Moore, the actress playing Nathalie, can't keep a straight face and giggles when she talks to Dr. Jones, for whatever reason.
Covers Always Lie: "From writer/producer/director/visionary James Nguyen The Master Of The Romantic Thriller comes the story of a sexy lingerie model (Whitney Moore) and a successful software salesman (Alan Bagh) on a weekend getaway to a quaint Northern California town. But when the entire region is attacked by millions of homicidal birds,
Read two dozen badly done superimposed CGI birds, while real birds go about their business ignoring the human characters
their picturesque paradise becomes a winged hell on earth. Can mankind now survive the avian onslaught of BIRDEMIC? Hollywood legend Tippi Hedren of Hitchcock's THE BIRDSco-stars
Meaning appears in archive footage. From Nguyen's other film. On a television screen. For one scene.
in the global cult movie phenomenon that Videogum says might end up being the greatest film of all time!\"
Tree-hugger Tom Hill casually announces that a mountain lion is approaching. He then strolls off screen in an equally unconcerned way.
Rod's muted reaction to Nathalie walking out of their hotel bathroom in her underwear ('You look fine'). You'd expect more enthusiasm from a man who has gone to a hotel room with a Victoria's Secret cover girl.
Rod is the Crown Prince of this trope. He reacts to killer birds attacking him and his company selling for one billion dollars in exactly the same way, with a blank look on his face. About the only time he shows any sort of emotion is when he makes his million dollar sale near the beginning, where he shouts "Whoo-hoo!" while Milking the Giant Cow. He's back to his normal bland self seconds later.
Ramsey doesn't seem terribly upset over Becky's death. But neither is the audience since the suspenseful music is playing for a good 15 seconds before the bird actually kills her.
Kevin:(seeing Nathalie) What were people's complaints about this movie again?
Bill: Well, that the acting, dialog, special effects, script, sound editing were all really, really terrible.
Kevin: Yeah, it is pretty great, isn't it?!
Even more egregious in the sequel - there is a random scene where three unnamed topless women converse before being attacked by the least threatening knife-wielding serial killer ever. This is apparently a shot for the movie, but given that the director was not present at the time, and there were no cameras in sight, these women just took their shirts off and were attacked for no reason. They're killed off in the same scene by birds even less convincing than the serial killer.
Funny Background Event: Unintentional examples. There are numerous points during the bird attack where people, cars, and actual birds can be seen simply going about their daily business in the background. During one scene, normal highway traffic is passing — in both directions — during a scene in which everyone was supposed to have evacuated the city.
Gaia's Vengeance: The birds have become mutated suicide bombers due to global warming, apparently in the span of a day.
Genre Shift: So abrupt you can hear the gearbox break!
Green Aesop: Characters speak highly of green technology before Gaia's Vengeance rears its head and various characters assert that global warming is killing the Earth.
Halfway Plot Switch: The first half of the movie is a romance, while the second half is a horror movie, mirroring The Birds.
They use coat hangers to fight off the birds in the first scene with them. The coat hangers weren't part of Nguyen's original script. Rod and Nathalie were supposed to grab a shower rod from a room to fend off attacking birds. There were no rods available at the Motel 6 where they were filming the scene, but there were coat hangers. The actors were aware of the Narm.
Whitney Moore: There's not a lot you can do to prepare yourself for something like swatting away non-existent birds with coat hangers. At that point in the shooting, I was pretty much just along for the ride.
In Birdemic II coat hangers will be replaced with umbrellas.
Improbable Aiming Skills: In spite of their usual inaccuracy, the heroes manage to shoot down a bunch of birds directly between them and innocent people. They hit nothing except birds.
Incest Is Relative: There's hints of this in the song "Hangin' Out With the Family," which chronicles a family gathering where "...the brothers can't wait to hook up" and "...grandma gets to pancin', to make sure, the fellas, don't try any glancin'!"
Rod is supposed to be a great salesman, yet he's a marble-mouthed speaker. In an opening scene, it's unclear whether he gives the buyer a massive discount or points out that his service is much cheaper than the competition. Neither strategy takes any skill in salesmanship.
Rod somehow invents cheap affordable solar power between scenes. He never displays the intelligence to pull off such a feat and can barely pronounce the word "solar panels."
The actress playing Nathalie is plenty attractive enough to play a model but for someone who just landed a Victoria's Secret gig no one seems to have any confidence in the future of her career.
According to Nathalie, Rod is intelligent and charming. We never see any evidence of this.
One would assume that Rod and Nathalie are both very wealthy, seeing as the former closes a massive contract and starts up an immediately successful alternative energy company, and the latter is a Victoria's Secret model. Yet neither of them show any signs at all of being wealthy, and when they go on vacation together, the best they can afford is a Motel 6.
Rod is clearly very well off, and the sequel even confirms this early on, by having Rod very casually write his friend a check for $100,000, and suggesting that he can very easily fund the remaining $900,000 that he needs for his movie. There are still no other signs of Rod being so rich, of course. He only is when the story needs him to be.
Insurmountable Waist High Fence: Dr Jones is guarding a bridge across two small ponds which would take only a few minutes to walk around.
Leave the Camera Running: The clumsy editing and slow pacing lead to a lot of this. There are numerous overly long establishing shots, and there are countless shots of people walking in and out of buildings, parking and pulling into traffic.
Made of Explodium: The birds often explode on impact, which the creator has stated is a result of their mutations.
Mood Whiplash: The movie shifts abruptly from a poorly executed romance to a monster movie thriller at the halfway point. The only hints of the Birdemic are in the title of the movie itself, and two brief encounter with CGI birds.
My Beloved Smother: Nathalie's mom, who — despite saying she is happy about her daughter's success as a model and her new job as the cover girl for the Victoria's Secret catalog — is extremely vocal about her belief that Nathalie should give up modeling to go into real estate.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Ramsey "rescues" several people who are hiding in a bus for safety by forcing them against their will into the open, where they're all immediately killed by a bunch of acid SPIT from the birds!
"Let's see if they need help" is a line that always results in somebody getting killed in the second movie.
Most of the interior scenes were clearly shot inside businesses that were closed for the night, and this is most apparent when Rod and Nathalie go out to a bar & grill after Rod meets Nathalie's mom. The only other people we see in the restaurant are the waiter and the singer!
Same with exterior shots near roads, where they couldn't get any temporarily halt on traffic driving by. Yes, your apocalypse is quite believable seeing a steady flow of traffic driving the speed limit behind your characters.
See the above example for Improvised Weapon. According to Whitney Moore, James Nguyen elected to have the actors use coat hangers as weapons rather than a shower curtain rod as scripted. Why? Because the Motel 6 they were filming at didn't have rods in their showers and apparently it would have broken the film's budget to go to a hardware store and spend $8-$16 to buy one.
The film has no music budget either, because most of the music is taken right from a catalogue of royalty-free production music and reused blatantly, give or take a few original compositions (and Hangin' Out). Riff Trax notices this right away:
Bill:(as Nguyen) Hi, I'm making a film and I'd like to pay you for a full score... wow, that much, huh? Well, how about a one minute song and we pause it and loop it again? Deal!
Mike:(as Nguyen) Hi, I'm making a film and I'd like to have it open on one of those long driving shots, you know, where you follow the car from above through a nice landscape... ooh, wow, that much, huh? How about if I just shoot from inside the car with a crappy home video camera? Deal!
During the "news" segments, viewers will notice that Nguyen couldn't even afford to have the Getty Images watermark removed from the stock footage.
They had to do one scene in a single take, because they didn't have the money to buy anymore cartons of orange juice, the prop that stood in for the bird's acidic saliva.
Inverted when Rod is talking to Natalie over the phone after her photoshoot. He actually has an iPhone while all the other phones in the film are flips. Though it's entirely possible that was the actor's personal phone.
No Ending: The movie does not so much end as coast to a stop.
Birdemic 2, on the other hand, straight up grinds to a stop.
Not So Different: Averted in a meta-sense. Nguyen's production had far lower production values than Tommy Wiseau's The Room, but unlike Wiseau, the actors stayed with the production instead of walking off in droves mid-production.
Noisy Nature: The "golden eagles" and "turkey vultures" make a constant, repeating seagull cry while attacking.
Cameron's Pub (where the bar date with Rod and Nathalie took place) has actually received a small popularity boost from the film, and has even recently held a Birdemic Fest with James Nguyen and "Just Hanging Out" singer Damien Carter.
Also inverted with many brand logos being blurred out.
When we first see Mai, the camera hovers over a poster for www.imaginepeace.com. Later, the only outfit she is seen wearing is identical to the poster.
Reaction Shot: Neither movie apparently trusts the audience to believe that a character is dead when they've clearly been killed by a bird. In both movies, each time anyone is killed by a bird, it always cuts to a reaction shot of their dead body, as if to confirm for the viewer each and every time that yes, this character is now dead.
Right Through His Pants: Apparently how Natalie has sex, given how she wakes up in the hotel. Credit must be given to Rod, though, who apparently had sex wearing a tanktop, slacks, and a belt.
Rule Of Cool: The hawks make divebomber sounds when attacking buildings. They also cause the buildings to explode.
Sanity Slippage: Ramsey suffers one, and "rescues" some people best left unrescued. And the audience.
At one point, the characters go out on a double date to see An Inconvenient Truth - reportedly one of James Nguyen's favorite movies of all time.
There's also several references to another one of Nguyen's favorite films, The Birds.
Both movies start out as romances, then change into horror films at the halfway mark.
Both films have a dead shopkeeper with their eyes pecked out.
The male lead is named in honor of Rod Taylor, the actor who played the romantic lead in The Birds. Nathalie's name could also be a reference to the actor who played the female lead of that movie - Nathalie "Tippi" Hedren.
Both films have an environmentalism theme, though Hitchcock's ecological message was subtler by far. Hitchcock had the birds attacking whenever smoke was visible in the background. Nguyen just has random fires and smoke clouds show up.
A shot of Tippi Hedren interacting with birds is visible for a moment on a television.
The first teaser trailer for the sequel redoes the shawarma stinger from The Avengers with the cast of the first movie.
Space Whale Aesop: If you contribute to global warming, the polar ice caps will melt, pine beetles will breed out of control, and angry, exploding animated .GIF birds will attack you.
In the sequel this extends to include rain of blood, giant exploding birds, cavemen randomly appearing and zombies for absolutely no explained reason.
Stalking Is Love: Most models aren't charmed by tech salesmen following them around. Granted, Bagh's bad acting makes him seem creepier than he might be, but his behavior is still odd.
Stock Sound Effects: Bicycle bells are bizarrely used as the sound effect for phones, and birds sound like World War II Japanese Zero dive bombers.
Suckiness Is Painful: James Nguyen built his own 3D rig for the sequel. If it's done with the care and quality of the first film's special effects, this trope could be literally true.
Suspiciously Specific Denial: Unintentional example. Becky gets attacked by a bird. Nathalie empties her gun into the bird sitting on Becky's face, then runs back to the car screaming "She's dead! I didn't do anything!"
Technical Pacifist: Ramsey says he left the military because he was tired of all of the killing. Yet he keeps a loaded M4 (which, being a burst-firing assault rifle with a collapsible stock, pistol grip, and short barrel, is ILLEGAL under California law and very expensive and hard to find under federal law) and several pistols (and apparently LOTS of ammo) in his van.
Rod gets quite mush-mouthed at times, especially when he's talking about his great inventions, slrpnls.
Also the gas station attendant charging $100 for a gallon of gasoline. The fact that Rod understood what he said is the only proof we have that the man was speaking English.
What Happened to the Mouse?: Nathalie's mother is featured heavily, but once the birds attacked is never mentioned or heard of again.
has been released. In 3D! And yes, Birdemic 2 is as terrible as the first movie.
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