Birdemic. A "must see"?

[Gob]

MOST aspiring Hollywood directors have a dream: packed premieres, adoring crowds and the sort of feverish internet buzz among film nerds that a marketing budget cannot buy.

James Nguyen has achieved all that. But not quite in the way he expected. His horror film, Birdemic: Shock and Terror, is being hailed as the worst film ever made. Indeed, its sheer awfulness is at the core of its rapidly growing success.

The movie, which Nguyen wrote, directed and financed, describes a bloody surprise attack by lethal flocks of eagles and vultures. If the plot appears to owe more than a little to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, then the directing and special effects do not.

Birdemic features acting as wooden as a tree, clunky camera work that amply illustrates Nguyen's budget of around $11,000 and crude special effects that reduce audiences to tears of laughter. The action scenes are staggeringly poor and the script laughable. ''[Birdemic] fails to deliver the terror but more than compensates with shock, i.e., the sounds of jaws falling to the floor in disbelief,'' wrote a reviewer in Variety magazine.

That sort of critical reception, and a summary rejection from the Sundance Film Festival, should have seen Birdemic shelved and forgotten by everyone except the poor souls who worked on the film. But Nguyen, who cheerfully admits he ''never went to film school'', refused to be beaten.

He embarked on a one-man publicity drive. Turned away by Sundance, he started showing the movie in bars around the festival. He covered an SUV in fake blood and bird droppings and played bird noises from its stereo and drove it around as a marketing device. He began to get a few midnight screenings, then stunned punters started to blog about their experience using Twitter and Facebook. The trailer became a hit on YouTube. More screenings followed, and word of mouth turned Birdemic into a must-see movie for its sheer dreadfulness.

Last weekend the Birdemic bandwagon landed in New York, packing out two screenings in Greenwich Village. Dozens of other screenings are scheduled across the US for the next three months. It has even been picked up by Severin Films, which is hoping for a general release date later this year.

Birdemic has all the makings of a true cult hit, in part because Nguyen did not intend the film to be bad; it was a genuine labour of love. ''You can't set out to make a cult hit,'' says Professor Robert Thompson, a pop culture expert at Syracuse University. ''Cult moves like this evolve because the audience decides they are going to like it because it is so bad.''

Not that Nguyen is complaining. He has endured all the jokes at his expense with delight, attending many of the screenings and soaking up the attention. He is working on a sequel, Birdemic: The Resurrection.

As the horror film blogger Melissa Lafsky wrote: ''Birdemic really is that bad. But at the end of the day, Nguyen wrote, directed, and completed a feature-length horror film, and now all the cool internet kids are talking about it. So who's the moron now?''

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/mov ... utostart=1

[@meric@nwom@n]

He's giving poor old Ed Wood a run for his money isn't he?

[Gob]

The success of failure.

[@meric@nwom@n]

I need to get a copy of Ed Wood[i/] and watch it again.