Cry Havoc
04-07-2010, 10:44 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/movies/25birdemic.html
If the title of “Birdemic: Shock and Terror” does not immediately tell you what kind of movie it is, its teaser trailer should do the trick.
In panoramic shots, it shows an idyllic Northern California town — city streets, parking lots, a pumpkin farm — over and over again. These scenes continue for more than a minute, until the ambient noise is punctured by menacing screeches. Suddenly the sky is filled with birds: badly animated birds, out of proportion to the dwellings below, that barely flap their wings as they glide by. Occasionally an aggravated fowl breaks away from its clip-art flock, plummeting to the ground and exploding in a similarly unconvincing cloud of smoke.
James Nguyen, the 43-year-old writer and director of “Birdemic,” a would-be thriller about an avian rampage, will be the first to tell you that it is far from a perfect film. But, as he said recently, “if it was perfect, in every angle and the visual effects and everything, maybe it wouldn’t be where it is today.”
Since “Birdemic” was discovered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival — where Mr. Nguyen brought it anyway and showed it in bars after it was rejected by the festival’s selection committee — it has become a cult hit on the midnight movie circuit. Crowds in Austin, Tex., Phoenix and Los Angeles have thrilled to its stilted dialogue, substandard production values and young heroes who defend themselves with coat hangers. (A “Birdemic” national tour is currently booked through the end of May.)
As “Birdemic” arrives in New York for late-night showings at the IFC Center on Friday and Saturday, it has spawned a discussion about why, of all the Z-grade movies that are made each year, this particular one should find favor with audiences. What has made Mr. Nguyen a latter-day anti-genius to rival Edward D. Wood Jr., whose 1959 horror dud “Plan 9 From Outer Space” became legendary for its countless defects?
“It’s something unexpected,” Mr. Nguyen said. “Maybe it’s meant to be like that.”
Evan Husney, who now works for the independent distributor Severin Films, was also at Sundance in 2009, where he spotted Mr. Nguyen driving a beat-up sport utility vehicle decorated with a prop eagle and fake blood, and blaring bird noises from its stereo.
“On the side of his car,” Mr. Husney said, “he had spelled the name of his own movie wrong. He had spelled it ‘Bidemic,’ without the R.”
Intrigued, Mr. Husney met Mr. Nguyen at a sparsely attended “Birdemic” screening. The movie, Mr. Husney said, looked “like a Super Nintendo game,” adding, “It was, like, the funniest thing I had ever seen in my entire life.” More fascinating was Mr. Nguyen himself, a Silicon Valley software salesman whose family fled Vietnam in 1975 before the fall of Saigon and who grew up in the United States enthralled by movies like “Somewhere in Time” and Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet.”
“But romance alone is not enough for me,” Mr. Nguyen said. “I’m not just interested in a chick flick.”
As a tribute to his favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock, Mr. Nguyen spent $10,000 and seven months’ worth of weekends in 2008 making “Birdemic.” “I never went to film school,” Mr. Nguyen said. “But I did go to what you’d call the film school of Hitchcock cinema.”
The investment seemed to pay off when Severin Films, which has handled the DVD releases of films like Enzo Castellari’s Inglorious Bastards and Richard Stanley’s “Hardware,” acquired “Birdemic” and began showing it at specialty cinemas across the country. Along the way, “Birdemic” received encouraging notices from the G4 geek-culture television series “Attack of the Show,” the horror movie Web site bloody-disgusting.com and even ew.com, the Web site of Entertainment Weekly.
Exactly why “Birdemic” has been greeted so warmly is up for debate. Gabe Delahaye, senior editor of the satirical pop-culture blog videogum.com, which has tracked the bewildering progress of “Birdemic” since July, said the film was remarkable for how its aspirations in no way align with its results.
If “Birdemic” were simply a cheaply made horror movie, of which hundreds are made each year, Mr. Delahaye said, “you’d just be watching something with grand ambitions not being able to achieve them.” But in this case, he said, “the fact that it’s low-budget didn’t have any effect on what he was trying to do.” He added, “Because who knows what he was trying to do?”
Joel Hodgson, the creator of the movie-mocking series “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” which ran from 1988 to 1999, said that especially terrible films can possess unusual charms.
“They’re adorable in a goofy way,” said Mr. Hodgson, who continues to riff on bad films in the troupe Cinematic Titanic. “It’s like a really weird-looking kid, where you just go, ‘Wow, he’s just cute.’ There are elements to his face that don’t work in any other place but on that face.”
The comedians Eric Wareheim and Tim Heidecker, who star in the Adult Swim series “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and who hosted the Los Angeles premiere of “Birdemic” in February, said that filmmakers like Mr. Nguyen were happy that people were watching their movies, even if only to make fun of them.
Mr. Wareheim compared Mr. Nguyen to filmmakers like Tommy Wiseau, whose byzantine drama “The Room” has also become a hit midnight movie, and Mark Borchardt, the frustrated horror director profiled in the documentary “American Movie.”
“What they really care about,” Mr. Wareheim said, “is that they’re going to be recognized and people are going to watch it, and people are going to talk about it, even if it’s bashing them. They’re just happy to eat the meal that was provided to them.”
Mr. Heidecker questioned whether Mr. Nguyen understood that audiences have been coming to “Birdemic” for its unintentional comedy.
“I was sitting next to James at the screening,” he said, “and he was giddy, shaking with laughter and high-fiving me: ‘This is the best, I did it.’ ‘What are you laughing at?’ ”
(Asked about the Los Angeles screening, Mr. Nguyen said: “A few people there, they were laughing at my movie. But I think the majority who were there really laughed with it.”)
Mr. Delahaye of videogum.com said there was nothing cruel in finding humor in the works of these maladroit directors.
“It’s not like they had a movie that was just for their friends and family,” he said, “and then a jerk took it and was like, ‘Look at this idiot and the movie he made.’ They made a movie and tried to promote it, and it became something that might not be what they originally intended.”
Mr. Nguyen said he had not been discouraged by the experience of “Birdemic.” “That’s the risk that I take in making a movie,” he said, “to be judged, to be reviewed — the good, the bad and the ugly. And so be it.”
Indeed, he is already at work on his next feature. It is a serial-killer film called “Peephole: The Perverted.”
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http://www.viceland.com/blogs/uk-film/2010/02/15/birdemic-is-the-new-best-worst-movie-ever/
Making the worst movie ever isn’t easy - way harder than making a bad movie. A bad movie is a just mediocre movie with a few problems that make it boring, uninteresting, or annoying - a bad cast, a stupid script, deliberate shittiness, or whatever. The worst movie ever, though, is not a mediocre movie at it’s core. The worst movie ever will convince you that it was actually made by a crazy man with either a lot of money or no money at all.
I thought nothing would top Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, but from Wiseau’s “own” San Francisco emerges James Nguyen’s Birdemic. The Room is a completely insane vanity project, but it’s at least competently technically executed. Birdemic is a completely insane morality tale made by a director who has yet to wrap his head around Mario Paint.
I’ve seen the film, I’ve interviewed Mr. Nguyen, and I’m still not sure this isn’t some elaborate joke. God knows the internet’s been rife with deceit lately. But if this is a joke, it’s the Kennedy assassination of jokes, and more power to it.
James Nguyen is a director who preempted lazy criticisms by never quitting his day job. When he doesn’t work as a salesman in Silicon Valley, he is the president of Moviehead Pictures, whose website has to be seen to be believed. As the story goes, he funded Birdemic out of pocket, its original release tanked, but after driving around the Sundance Film Festival in a van covered in dead birds, he found a distributor in Severin Films.
More in the article.
If the title of “Birdemic: Shock and Terror” does not immediately tell you what kind of movie it is, its teaser trailer should do the trick.
In panoramic shots, it shows an idyllic Northern California town — city streets, parking lots, a pumpkin farm — over and over again. These scenes continue for more than a minute, until the ambient noise is punctured by menacing screeches. Suddenly the sky is filled with birds: badly animated birds, out of proportion to the dwellings below, that barely flap their wings as they glide by. Occasionally an aggravated fowl breaks away from its clip-art flock, plummeting to the ground and exploding in a similarly unconvincing cloud of smoke.
James Nguyen, the 43-year-old writer and director of “Birdemic,” a would-be thriller about an avian rampage, will be the first to tell you that it is far from a perfect film. But, as he said recently, “if it was perfect, in every angle and the visual effects and everything, maybe it wouldn’t be where it is today.”
Since “Birdemic” was discovered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival — where Mr. Nguyen brought it anyway and showed it in bars after it was rejected by the festival’s selection committee — it has become a cult hit on the midnight movie circuit. Crowds in Austin, Tex., Phoenix and Los Angeles have thrilled to its stilted dialogue, substandard production values and young heroes who defend themselves with coat hangers. (A “Birdemic” national tour is currently booked through the end of May.)
As “Birdemic” arrives in New York for late-night showings at the IFC Center on Friday and Saturday, it has spawned a discussion about why, of all the Z-grade movies that are made each year, this particular one should find favor with audiences. What has made Mr. Nguyen a latter-day anti-genius to rival Edward D. Wood Jr., whose 1959 horror dud “Plan 9 From Outer Space” became legendary for its countless defects?
“It’s something unexpected,” Mr. Nguyen said. “Maybe it’s meant to be like that.”
Evan Husney, who now works for the independent distributor Severin Films, was also at Sundance in 2009, where he spotted Mr. Nguyen driving a beat-up sport utility vehicle decorated with a prop eagle and fake blood, and blaring bird noises from its stereo.
“On the side of his car,” Mr. Husney said, “he had spelled the name of his own movie wrong. He had spelled it ‘Bidemic,’ without the R.”
Intrigued, Mr. Husney met Mr. Nguyen at a sparsely attended “Birdemic” screening. The movie, Mr. Husney said, looked “like a Super Nintendo game,” adding, “It was, like, the funniest thing I had ever seen in my entire life.” More fascinating was Mr. Nguyen himself, a Silicon Valley software salesman whose family fled Vietnam in 1975 before the fall of Saigon and who grew up in the United States enthralled by movies like “Somewhere in Time” and Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet.”
“But romance alone is not enough for me,” Mr. Nguyen said. “I’m not just interested in a chick flick.”
As a tribute to his favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock, Mr. Nguyen spent $10,000 and seven months’ worth of weekends in 2008 making “Birdemic.” “I never went to film school,” Mr. Nguyen said. “But I did go to what you’d call the film school of Hitchcock cinema.”
The investment seemed to pay off when Severin Films, which has handled the DVD releases of films like Enzo Castellari’s Inglorious Bastards and Richard Stanley’s “Hardware,” acquired “Birdemic” and began showing it at specialty cinemas across the country. Along the way, “Birdemic” received encouraging notices from the G4 geek-culture television series “Attack of the Show,” the horror movie Web site bloody-disgusting.com and even ew.com, the Web site of Entertainment Weekly.
Exactly why “Birdemic” has been greeted so warmly is up for debate. Gabe Delahaye, senior editor of the satirical pop-culture blog videogum.com, which has tracked the bewildering progress of “Birdemic” since July, said the film was remarkable for how its aspirations in no way align with its results.
If “Birdemic” were simply a cheaply made horror movie, of which hundreds are made each year, Mr. Delahaye said, “you’d just be watching something with grand ambitions not being able to achieve them.” But in this case, he said, “the fact that it’s low-budget didn’t have any effect on what he was trying to do.” He added, “Because who knows what he was trying to do?”
Joel Hodgson, the creator of the movie-mocking series “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” which ran from 1988 to 1999, said that especially terrible films can possess unusual charms.
“They’re adorable in a goofy way,” said Mr. Hodgson, who continues to riff on bad films in the troupe Cinematic Titanic. “It’s like a really weird-looking kid, where you just go, ‘Wow, he’s just cute.’ There are elements to his face that don’t work in any other place but on that face.”
The comedians Eric Wareheim and Tim Heidecker, who star in the Adult Swim series “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and who hosted the Los Angeles premiere of “Birdemic” in February, said that filmmakers like Mr. Nguyen were happy that people were watching their movies, even if only to make fun of them.
Mr. Wareheim compared Mr. Nguyen to filmmakers like Tommy Wiseau, whose byzantine drama “The Room” has also become a hit midnight movie, and Mark Borchardt, the frustrated horror director profiled in the documentary “American Movie.”
“What they really care about,” Mr. Wareheim said, “is that they’re going to be recognized and people are going to watch it, and people are going to talk about it, even if it’s bashing them. They’re just happy to eat the meal that was provided to them.”
Mr. Heidecker questioned whether Mr. Nguyen understood that audiences have been coming to “Birdemic” for its unintentional comedy.
“I was sitting next to James at the screening,” he said, “and he was giddy, shaking with laughter and high-fiving me: ‘This is the best, I did it.’ ‘What are you laughing at?’ ”
(Asked about the Los Angeles screening, Mr. Nguyen said: “A few people there, they were laughing at my movie. But I think the majority who were there really laughed with it.”)
Mr. Delahaye of videogum.com said there was nothing cruel in finding humor in the works of these maladroit directors.
“It’s not like they had a movie that was just for their friends and family,” he said, “and then a jerk took it and was like, ‘Look at this idiot and the movie he made.’ They made a movie and tried to promote it, and it became something that might not be what they originally intended.”
Mr. Nguyen said he had not been discouraged by the experience of “Birdemic.” “That’s the risk that I take in making a movie,” he said, “to be judged, to be reviewed — the good, the bad and the ugly. And so be it.”
Indeed, he is already at work on his next feature. It is a serial-killer film called “Peephole: The Perverted.”
--------
http://www.viceland.com/blogs/uk-film/2010/02/15/birdemic-is-the-new-best-worst-movie-ever/
Making the worst movie ever isn’t easy - way harder than making a bad movie. A bad movie is a just mediocre movie with a few problems that make it boring, uninteresting, or annoying - a bad cast, a stupid script, deliberate shittiness, or whatever. The worst movie ever, though, is not a mediocre movie at it’s core. The worst movie ever will convince you that it was actually made by a crazy man with either a lot of money or no money at all.
I thought nothing would top Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, but from Wiseau’s “own” San Francisco emerges James Nguyen’s Birdemic. The Room is a completely insane vanity project, but it’s at least competently technically executed. Birdemic is a completely insane morality tale made by a director who has yet to wrap his head around Mario Paint.
I’ve seen the film, I’ve interviewed Mr. Nguyen, and I’m still not sure this isn’t some elaborate joke. God knows the internet’s been rife with deceit lately. But if this is a joke, it’s the Kennedy assassination of jokes, and more power to it.
James Nguyen is a director who preempted lazy criticisms by never quitting his day job. When he doesn’t work as a salesman in Silicon Valley, he is the president of Moviehead Pictures, whose website has to be seen to be believed. As the story goes, he funded Birdemic out of pocket, its original release tanked, but after driving around the Sundance Film Festival in a van covered in dead birds, he found a distributor in Severin Films.
More in the article.