“Don’t try looking up Birdemic in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention!” This warning comes from diaCRITIC Michelle Ton, a graduate student of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA. Here she relays how “you have to know the rules in order to break the rules” in order to make “the be-all, end-all worst of the worst Z-grade films in film history.”
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The year is 1963. Larger-than-life auteur Alfred Hitchcock releases his 55th feature film, The Birds, which is then to remain his most abstract, irrational, and indisputable masterpiece among his other canonical films in his oeuvre. Film scholar Robin Wood makes the following comparison:
“A Hitchcock film—and The Birds is a particularly good example of this—is more analogous to a poem than a novel: Hitchcock focuses the attention and perceptions of the spectator, controls his reactions through the rhythms of editing and camera movement as a poet controls those of the reader through his verse rhythms; and his films derive their value from the intensity of their images—an intensity created and controlled very largely by context, by the total organization—rather than from the creation of ‘rounded’ characters.”
Rhythms of editing. Camera movement. Controlling spectators’ attention and perceptions. Intensity of images. Wood’s equation can easily be appropriated to discuss James Nguyen and his 2008 film Birdemic: Shock and Terror—in an ironic, antithetical, on-the-other-side-of-the-spectrum-to-Hitchcock sort of way, of course.
James Nguyen is a “Moviehead.” A“Master of the Romantic Thriller™” (The trademark is his doing). But above all, he is a self-professed Hitchcock savant. Well, he’s a software salesman, too. But that’s besides the point. It is sometime around midnight on Fairfax Boulevard in Hollywood. It is a cold, wet, rainy Friday night. The air is thick with irony and self-awareness as the queue of hipsters wraps around the block of The Silent Movie Theater. It is February 25th and Cinefamily is hosting a celebratory one-year anniversary screening since the Los Angeles premiere of Nguyen’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror. According to the head programmer, they have screened this film more than any other at their theater. As the masses eagerly wait for doors to open, we are each given the following by staff members: a wire hanger and a piece of paper with the following printed instructions.
DRINK when the sound drops out.
DRINK when a current event is mentioned.
DRINK when a sale is closed.
DRINK when you hear the word retirement.
DRINK when a bird dies.
DRINK when a human dies.
DRINK when the two bird noises sync up.
I know immediately to check any aesthete sensibilities at the door and prepare myself for the unmitigated public inebriation of my fellow spectators.
Once inside the theater lobby, I see a man who I can only assume to be James Nguyen himself. He is short with a buzzed head. He wears a slate colored, cut-rate looking Gabardine double-breasted suit with a loud silk neck tie of the American flag. And he has tasseled penny loafers. I can tell he wears this configuration un-ironically.
I like him already.
Nguyen notices my gaze and eagerly makes his way towards me. He sticks out his hand and greets me with a genial handshake. “Hi, welcome! Thank you so much for being here!”
The man is endearing, enthusiastic, and above all, wholly grateful.
James Nguyen is 44-years-old. He emigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. in 1975 and settled in San Jose, California where he remained for most of his life and had a career as a software salesman. Nguyen tells me during our pre-screen chat that he never went to film school. “But I did go to the Hitchcockian film school!”
Nguyen’s oeuvre consists of three films: Jack and Jill (2001)—a romantic thriller/modern day Romeo and Juliet starring Tippi Hendren, the lead actress in The Birds. (What? WHAT?); Replica (2004) –another romantic thriller; and his pièce de résistance, Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2009), the be-all, end-all worst of the worst Z-grade films in film history.
And it’s a romantic thriller.
At this point in the night, everyone has settled into their seats, beer in one hand (courtesy of Cinefamily) and wire hanger in the other. The lights dim and the overture, fitting for the film, is an official Birdemic music video by a horrorcore band named Chamber of Pudd (I’ve never heard of them either).
Dreadful.
After an introduction by the head programmer, Nguyen makes his way to the front of the theater as the audience cheers him on. The man appears elated, glowing, and red in the face—blushing from such unexpected fervent adoration. Or perhaps it’s because of the Tecate he’s been drinking. Nguyen performs the pomp and circumstance of “ARE YOU READY?”, pumping his audience up for the spectacle they are about to witness. Before sitting down, he tells us one last thing, “What I want the most is for my movie to make you all think, really think, long after it’s over.”
It has been days now since I’ve last seen Birdemic and I am indeed still thinking about the film. (And not just because I have to write a review for it.)
A homage to The Birds, Birdemic: Shock and Terror’s premise is simple, much like its predecessor. Boy and girl meet. They fall in love. Then, bat-shit crazy birds appear without warning and inexplicably attack and kill the populace. More or less. There is an adage in film school: you have to know the rules in order to break the rules. What is meant by this is that you must first understand the significance of narrative construction, style, and other film forms and how they operate as a formal system if you’re intending to subvert. Within the first ten minutes of Birdemic, James Nguyen breaks every single rule regarding cinematic formal expectations, conventions, feeling, and meaning. The brilliance lies not in his intentionality, in the Godardian sense, but in his sheer ignorance of the concept and principles of film form and his brazen execution despite said ignorance. The reasons that B-horror films typically achieve cult status is because they’re so bad, they’re good. To be sure, Birdemic is a deliriously bad movie, which makes it the best worst film. Here is a list of what is terrible about Birdemic and what makes it great.
BAD:
Acting, Directing, Writing, Editing, Sound, Special Effects, Music, Narrative, Story, Cinematography, Mise-en-scene.
GOOD:
Acting, Directing, Writing, Editing, Sound, Special Effects, Music, Narrative, Story, Cinematography, Mise-en-scene.
In order for a B-horror movie to become a cult classic favorite, the listed contents of the Bad and Good must be one and the same. Unknowingly perfecting imperfection is key. Just to expound somewhat on said bad and good elements in Birdemic, the free-for-all editing is perhaps the most egregious with its superfluous frames, meaningless/aimless footage featuring abnormally long takes (this is not European art house cinema, by the way), incalculable unrefined shot- reverse-shots, and utterly skewed rhythmic, spatial and temporal relations. I would need to write a dissertation length piece to fully cover all the elements of what makes Birdemic truly awful and truly memorable and enduring in its re-watchability.
Though filming was arduous (it took 7 months of weekends), let it be known that neither stars of the film, Whitney Moore and Alan Baugh, would change a thing about Birdemic as they confessed to the audience during Q&A.
What I love most about this film can be summed up in one word, and it happens to be the same word that James Nguyen provides as an answer (the best answer I have ever heard from a director) to one audience member’s probing and appropriate question:
“James! Why is your film so fucking awesome?!”
His answer? Simply and impossibly:
“Sincerity.”
_
[1] Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. p. 64
[1] Haus (1988), The Human Centipede (2009), The Room (2003), Plan 9 From Outer Space (1958), just to name a few.
– Michelle Ton has most recently blogged for diaCRITICS on the New Voices from Vietnam film series. She lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is a graduate student of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA.
Birdemic can be watched through Netflix or ordered from Amazon.
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Nice work, Michelle. I think you’re absolutely right about the inherent contradiction in B-level cult films, in that the qualities of the film that are derided must also be touted in order for the film to ascend to that cult status. I still wonder about what this could mean about the cinematic experience in general. Is it possible that we place too much emphasis on high quality cinema according to some film school standard? Birdemic shows that they are still ways to connect with an audience without ascribing to that ideology.