WINGS OF DISASTER: THE BIRDEMIC TRILOGY
Synopsis: In 2010, software salesman turned writer/producer/director James Nguyen harnessed the powers of action, adventure and environmental awareness to ask, “Why did the eagles and vultures attacked?” Nguyen’s groundbreaking BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR soon became a global phenomenon and launched his career as The Master of the Romantic Thriller™. In 2013 Nguyen returned with his biggest budget to date for BIRDEMIC 2: THE RESURRECTION, never-before available on Blu-ray and exclusive to this collection. Nearly a decade after his original classic took flight, the auteur The New York Times hails as “a latter-day anti-genius” brought his extraordinary saga full circle with BIRDEMIC 3 - SEA EAGLE. For the first time ever, WINGS OF DISASTER: THE BIRDEMIC TRILOGY gathers Nguyen’s complete avian epic on 3 discs with 13+ hours of Special Features for a cinematic vision that remains unlike any you’ve ever seen!
When this triple-threat box set showed up on my doorstep for review my fist honest reaction was "on no, not this"... I remember back in 2010 when Birdeminc: Shock and Terror was making the rounds at screenings and inexplicably getting some widespread mainstream news coverage, I was curious and watched the trailer and I knew there was no way I would be wasting my time on such a low-budget shit-show. Well, the laughs on me, leave it to the fine purveyors of very fine crap at Severin/Intervision to have not only released the first film and financed the third, but they've packed all three films into a new box set chock full of extras. Is it worth your time? Well, how strong is your constitution for z-grade crappola?
BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR (2008)
Label: Severin Films
Region Code: Region Free
Rating: Unrated
Duration: 90 Minutes
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.78:1)
Audio: English 5.1 DTS, 2.0 Stereo with Optional English Subtitles
Director: James Nguyen
Cast: Alan Bagh, Whitney Moore, Janae Caster, Colton Osborne, Adam Sessa
The first film does good work setting up the wretchedness that will remain a constant through all three movies, if you can make it through this you should have no problem dregding through the next two, but I do not advise attempting such a feat in one sitting. In it we have a love story between waitress/model Nathalie (Whitney Moore) and software salesman Rod (Alan Bagh). The first half of the film is their prolonged meet-cute peppered with boring ass montages of cars driving endlessly, people walking down the street, and painfully poorly recorded audio levels in which background noise fluctuates to a maddening degree. I love me some vintage low-budget dreck but Birdemic is easily one of the most shoddily made movies of all-time, and that's not just hyperbole - a few minutes into this and you will be apologizing to Tommy Wiseau for shitting on The Room and visiting the graves of Al Adamson and Ed Wood to apologize for disparaging their fine (by comparison) bodies of work. Worse than the fact that it's poorly made, executed and acted is that it takes Birdemic a ridiculously long time to get to any actual bird carnage, an egregious cinema sin, and when it does you're treated to the most outrageously awful digital bird effects you've ever seen in a widely commercially available film. You will bare witness to a shoddy assortment of poorly animated digital cutouts, that for some reason at times have the added sound effects of kamikaze plane as they dive into the ground and bizarrely explode without explanation. The way the actors deliver every line of dullsville dialogue is stilted and painful, and the inept way they handle their toy guns is as stupefying as the canned gunshot sounds effects with Atari level digital muzzle flashes.
Obviously writer/producer/director James Nguyen loves Hitchcock's The Birds, and is passionate about his film, you can tell he's quite earnest in his intentions, but the film is cringey bad, I didn't even have fun making fun of it. I tried to watch it with my kids but even they wouldn't stick around for more than ten minutes of it. That Nguyen went onto direct two sequels, all hampered by poor dialogue
delivered unnaturally, and stuffed to the gills with an admirable but ham-fisted pro environmental messages, is baffling to me. His every cinematic instinct seems completely wrong; the videography is inept, the audio is poorly recorded, the editing is sloppy, the acting is stiff, and the script - it's all trash. This is a veritable master class in how not to make a watchable movie. I was never really a huge MSTK3 or Rifftrax sort of guy, and while I've rightfully been accused by my wife of liking bad films this is bottom of the dumpster slice of lo-fi trash, that it has a cult-following, let alone a pair of sequels, absolutely boggles my mind.
Special Features:
- Audio Commentary With Director James Nguyen
- Audio Commentary With Stars Alan Bagh And Whitney Moore
- Deleted Scenes (2 min)
- Birdemic Experience Tour Featurette (12 min)
- James Nguyen On Movie Close Up (27 min)
- Moviehead: The James Nguyen Story Teaser (1 min)
- Birdemic Experience 2010 Trailer (2 min)
- Teaser Trailer (3 min)
- Theatrical Trailer (31 sec)
- Electronic Press Kit (3 min)
BIRDEMIC 2: THE RESURRECTION (2013)
Label: Intervision
Region Code: Region Free
Rating: Unrated
Duration: 79 Minutes
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.78:1)
Audio: English 5.1 DTS, 2.0 Stereo with Optional English Subtitles
Director: James Nguyen
Cast: Alan Bagh, Whitney Moore, Thomas Favaloro
They made a sequel!?! Yup, three years after after the first film writer/director James Nguyen returned with a slightly bigger (but still quite tiny) budget to make Birdemic 2: The Resurrection - offering more of the same low rent eco-terror, but also managing to up the production value with multiple scenes shot on the legendary Universal backlot and adding some not-unappreciated gratuitous nudity. We also get a laugh-out-loud CGI jellyfish attack (that makes the shitty digital birds look decent by comparison), plus we are treated to prehistoric eagles, hawks, vultures (and cavemen!) that rise from The La Brea Tar Pits to wreak havoc on the Hollywood community, brought about by a mysterious red rain. There's some patented Nguyen romance by way of a Hollywood director (Thomas Favaloro) who meets a struggling young actress (Chelsea Turnbo) and sparks fly between the pair, but of course the bird shit eventually hits the schlock-fan big time and more bizarre exploding bird wretchedness ensues. This one has higher quality digital video at least but is overstuffed with shots of people walking on the street, walks on the beach, pro-environmental
monologues, and some dancing to pad out the running time. It's a chore to get through for sure, and it took me no fewer than three sittings to get through this 82-minute long film! I couldn't handle it, I tapped out multiple times, and I was actually getting mad at myself for watching it. The "best" stuff for me was the shots filmed on the backlot of Universal, it was a hoot to see them fighting off shitty digital birds in front of the graffitied Amity island billboard. The stuff with the re-animated cave men (attacking an RV) and the threat of newly risen zombies attacking the group not so much. They were just throwing too much silly shit around and trying to make it stick, but it just stank. Two films into this trilogy and I still don't get the appeal. On the plus side, there's some fun nudity and it's eleven minutes shorter than the first film, which I appreciated.
Special Features:
- Audio Commentary With Director James Nguyen
- Audio Commentary With Producer Jeff Gross And Actors Alan Bagh & Thomas Favaloro
- Audio Commentary With Cinematographer Bobby Hacker And Actress Whitney Moore
- Cast And Crew Interviews (20 min)
- Behind The Scenes (5 min)
- Trailer (3 min)
BIRDEMIC 3: SEA EAGLE (2022)
Label: Intervision
Region Code: Region Free
Rating: Unrated
Duration: 83 Minutes
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.0:1)
Audio: English 2.0 Stereo with Optional English Subtitles
Director: James Nguyen
Cast: Alan Bagh, Ryan Lord, Julia Culbert
Writer/director James Nguyen goes back to his Birdemic roots for the trilogy finale (?), in keeping with the previous entries global warming triggers more climate chaos along the Northern California coast, by way of a plague of non-native Southeast Asian sea eagles who begin attacking scenic Santa Cruz. This time out the love story involves a pair of scientific researchers, Evan (Ryan Lord) and Kim (Julia Culbert), their budding romance interrupted by the now familiar avian-attack. Nguyen explores his Hitchcock love having the characters visit a familiar location from Vertigo. The digital photography is once more slightly improved, looking glossier than ever but somehow still quite shoddy, and over stuffed with stock footage that looks like it was stolen from commercial industry promos and virtual real estate tours, and of course we get more laborious driveing footage and long walks along the beach, plus a ton of drone footage. Nguyen really slams this one chock full of environmental monologues that go on forever. Sadly, there's no nudity this time around, and worse of all, in an 83-minute long moving it's close to a full hour before the shit-storm of digital avian sea eagles begin dive bombing, exploding and wing-slashing throats. I had hoped that the final flick would somehow redeem this three-film shit show, but it's more of the same, but somehow it's even more boring than what came before it. The best part of this film is the Van Gogh inspired artwork, the rest is total ham-fisted eco-horror shit-fest.
Special Features:
- Introduction By Director James Nguyen (3 min)
- Audio Commentary With James Nguyen
- Audio Commentary With Cast Members Ryan Lord, Julia Culbert And Alan Bagh
- Audio Commentary With BIRDEMIC 2: THE RESURRECTION Background Actor/Four-Time Jeopardy Champion Andy Wood And His Neighbor Tony
- Festival Highlights (7 min)
- Trailer (3 min)
The 3-movie set arrives with three keepcase housing the individual films, each with single-sided sleeves of artwork, which are housed within a sideloading slipbox. The box itself is pretty flimsy, befitting of the shoddy films inside, but it does have a cool lenticular cover. Severin have long favored the downtrodden underdogs of low-budget cinema with deluxe box sets commemorating the bodies of work of Al Adamson and Ray Dennis Steckler, and in that spirit it's totally appropriate that they've chosen to herald director James Nguyen and his awful avian flicks. Notably, this set is not quite what I would call "deluxe", but who knows, maybe in 40-50 years there will be a deluxe Nguyen box set collecting all his yet to be made future classics, chock full of bonus content examining his body of work by the future genre historians. I'm sure 40 years ago no one thought we'd we celebrating the films of Adams and Steckler either. These films are just not for me, I did not enjoy them even in an ironic sort of way, but I know fans are out there for these, and hats off to Severin for serving that bottom-feeding realm of fandom, but there's no way I will watch these again, at least I hope not.
Screenshots from the Severin Films Blu-ray:
Birdemic: Shock and Terror
Birdemic 2: The Resurrection
