What I Think About Movies I've Seen

Rod (Alan Bagh) has pretty much everything going for him. He's a successful salesman for a software company that's being acquired for an obscene amount of money, and venture capitalists have just decided to give him lots of money for another idea he's working on. One day, he meets Nathalie (Whitney Moore) and they hit it off instantly and start to get serious. Then out of nowhere their lives get completely upended by a sudden slew of attacks from killer birds, including crows, vultures, and eagles and they have to fight to survive.

I'm kind of torn about how to rate this movie. On one had, everything about it is absolutely terrible. I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into from the trailer, and that was immediately confirmed by the opening shot of the movie. It appears to be shot using a relatively low resolution digital camera, so the image quality isn't all that great. The camera work was horrible, with extreme shakiness at times (especially in the opening shot), frequently shot at odd angles so that the scene was somewhat tilted, and several long lingering shots on things that are completely unimportant and irrelevant to the story. The sound was awful, with frequent breaks between lines from different characters and often background noise that was so loud that it drowned out the dialog. When you could hear the dialog, it was so inane and poorly-delivered that it lacked any sense of realism. And then there's the incredibly bad CGI, which made it look more like an augmented reality video than a movie, and poor chroma-keying that left obvious borders around the characters for scenes shot in front of a green screen. There were continuity errors all over the place, and the story far surpassed even The Happening in its eco-preachiness.

On the other hand, this was an incredibly fun movie to watch, especially in a packed theater. It's an absolute work of genius to have everything be so obviously bad that it becomes hilarious watching the movie constantly trying to outdo itself. Although it did get a little slow toward the end, it never got to the point where it moved past being "so bad it's good" to just being awful. The audience really embraced the movie, and I'm pretty sure that when I wasn't laughing out loud I had a really stupid grin on my face.

Unfortunately, though, I think that the fun I had watching the movie was too superficial for me to be able to give it a really good rating. First, I don't think that it would stand up well to multiple viewings, since the gimmick did start to wear a little thin. Second, I don't think that it would be received nearly as well by a smaller audience or at a home viewing, because I think that you really do need the audience to continue fueling the fun. And finally, my faith in the genius of the director James Nguyen (who was in attendance at this screening) was somewhat dashed by the Q&A after the movie where he revealed that he had intended the movie to be serious and wasn't trying for comedy. Several times, Nguyen referred to it as a happy accident and mentioned that he was shocked at all the laughter it got both at our screening and at last Saturday's premiere in Hollywood. It's currently got a 2.0 rating on IMDB, and I can definitely see how that rating is deserved (and possibly even generous), but I also can't ignore how much fun I had watching it so I feel compelled to give it a middle-of-the-road rating.