Birdemic 2: The Resurrection.

Review #1101: Birdemic 2: The Resurrection.

Cast: 
Alan Bagh (Rod), Whitney Moore (Nathalie), Patsy van Ettinger (Nathalie's mom), Thomas Favaloro (Bill), Chelsea Turnbo (Gloria), Brittany N. Pierce (Jessica), Thuan Luu (Will), and Aaron Pressburg (Dustin) Directed by James Nguyen (#184 - Birdemic: Shock and Terror)

Review: 
Note: Older fans of Movie Night will remember how I covered the first Birdemic back on June 26, 2012 as part of my "Tour de Worse Trilogy" (which ironically had no French films in that series. I also was 15 when I came up with that name), and the film's quality was...less than satisfactory, one might say. It has an important distinction as the first ever movie that I gave a 0/10 star rating, with six other films "achieving the honor" in the six years (and nearly 1,000 reviews) that have passed since Birdemic - The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (#442), The Magic Voyage (#467), Battlefield Earth (#704), The Beast of Yucca Flats (#744), Monster A-Go-Go (#756), and Red Zone Cuba (#876). Hopefully you will enjoy this review.

The original film had a "variety" of terrible things about it, such as its wooden acting, generic dialogue, boring pace and "memorable" bird effects. There were things that I had forgotten to talk about in Birdemic: Shock and Terror, such as the fact that the film had taken four years to make (with shooting at various locations without permits), and that the actors in the film would serve as crew members for things such as holding microphones or doing the makeup, with fake names used to hide that fact in the credits. Looking at the official website for the film is a strange thing in of itself, since it makes the site for The Room (2003) look downright normal by comparison. The film has gained some sort of cult status as a "so bad, it's good" sort of movie, although I can't really say that applies since I feel that Birdemic is simply terrible, where even Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) is more interesting to think about as a bad flick (particularly in recent years with the discovery of the original 16mm workprint and ensuing restoration), but I digress.

The very fact that there exists a sequel is laughable, complete with the slogan on its poster being that "Hollywood is about to take a beating"...suffice to say that the only thing to take a beating after this film is the viewer. I will say that there is one true line in the whole film (emphasis mine): "I don't know much about the movie business, but I know how to read and I like your story." If you come into this movie looking to make fun of it, I suppose you will get a real kick out of going through the inane nature that encompasses its 79 minute run-time. Actually, you may get more than what you come looking for, as this is a treasure trove of awful film-making decisions. Much of the same criticisms from the first film can still apply to this one, complete with some new ones, such as having dialogue that manages to be repetitive, a bizarrely executed climax, padding to a nth degree, and other various things that makes this a slog to watch. Bagh and Moore return from the previous installment, although the real focus (in a sense) of the film is on Favaloro and Turnbo's characters, and it's interesting to see how one can't really find much difference in acting quality in any of these actors. This time around, it would seem that Nguyen wanted to make his sequel bigger in terms of its effects, and nothing summarizes this better than the scene with the "giant jumbo jellyfish", or perhaps the sequences with blood rain shooting out into the screen was intended to be the pinnacle. Honorable mention goes to the caveman and zombie sequences, which come out of nowhere in a movie with no real sort of logic. Seriously, there are sequences involving cavemen being attacked by the birds, and they actually are revived by the "blood rain", although their story isn't resolved in any sort of satisfactory way much like the rest of the plot "threads" in the film.

Nothing speaks a good movie like having a five minute opening sequence of walking, complete with blurred out faces, which is certainly a first in watching a movie. To list all of the flaws in what makes this slop of a movie would be a bad idea, since the review would end with scribbles of words that I wrote when trying to do "notes" when watching it - I did one page and that was it. The most amusing thing is the numerous references to other movies, from Vertigo (1958) to even Nguyen's own film named Replica (2005), which just goes to show that there really is no sense of irony in what goes on in watching terrible movies like this, where the movie even has a scene with A Day at the U.N. on a film marquee, which interestingly was a film that would've starred the Marx Brothers and directed by Billy Wilder - if it had been made. In a technical sense, this film made me curious to learn something - albeit something that didn't even exist. You could likely make a better film by simply drawing the events that occur on screen, or simply using shadow puppets to cover as special effects.

Can I give the film any sort of credit for its rating? As I reflected on what I saw and what it means to give a film the rating it deserves, I realized that there is only one true rating for this movie in my view. Congratulations, Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, you've earned something from me that not many films get. The film may be a waste of time, but truly this is a film that is worth every criticism it gets.

Overall, I give it 0 out of 10 stars.