Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) is more than just the title of a film, it’s also a film. In this film, on a place resembling Earth, in a little burg called Half Moon Bay, software engineer/salesman Rod (Alan Bagh) manages to make the biggest sale of his career and lands a date with supermodel Nathalie (Whitney Moore) on the same day! As their relationship blooms, their world is thrown into chaos as eagles start attacking the people of their coastal town. Somehow, the couple survives only to return in Birdemic 2: The Resurrection (2013). When Rod and Nathalie are just starting their new lives as Hollywood producer and actress respectively, the damn birds return along with resurrected cavepeople and zombies. Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle (2022) is also a film, but the story is totally different as two young and hot scientists find love as groups of people talk at them about global warming for 83 minutes.

I am very late to the party when it comes to Birdemic, probably because I don’t seek out so-bad-they’re-good movies on purpose very often. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of Zombi 3 (1988), Miami Connection (1987), Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987), House of the Dead (2003), Grease 2 (1982), etc. and yet Birdemic kept eluding me. After viewing, it, I can honestly say that its reputation as one of the best worst films of all time is well-earned. But what no one told me was how mind-warpingly and unsettlingly weird Birdemic is. I feel as though director, writer, and producer, James Nguyen, was born in a laboratory somewhere and then raised by mannequins before being dropped into the film industry as an adult.

With music that sounds like it was lifted from the queue of a Disney ride (but in a bad way) and the cinematic prowess of an unpromising film student’s final project, Birdemic is a gamechanger (if the game cartridge is glitching out). The characters are so thinly and wrongheadedly conceived that I was rooting for the computer-generated clip art birds before they even showed up. By the third film I was also rooting for global warming to destroy all of mankind just to get me out of the pain of sitting through it. Even by the second film, some of the actors have a “Why are we even doing this?” vibe to their performances. Whitney Moore’s face slips into a bored, thousand-yard-stare in her very first scene in Birdemic 2. Then later, during the nightclub scene, she bursts into a manic energy that made me afraid for her safety.

I have seen many, many bad films that contain movie mistakes, but I’ve never seen so many mistakes in a trilogy by a single director before. In all three of the physically and emotionally demanding Birdemic movies, I saw mistakes that I could have never even have conceived of. A jump cut in the middle of a word. A scene with at least three different audio sources and all of them badly recorded. Someone’s long hair blowing in the wind in the corner of the frame while the camera is following a car along the road. Whose hair was that? Why was that shot used in the movie? Why am I watching all three of these damn things? Why am I writing about them? What is the point of anything anymore?

Yes, I’m riding these movies pretty hard. The fact is that I’m jealous because Nguyen has made his mark and people are still talking about his work 13 years after it should have been forgotten, and I’ve never made a damned thing. And for real, I’m kinda proud of a guy who had a story to tell, and the fact that he couldn’t tell it was never of any concern. If you love bad movies -heck, if you love good movies- you need to see Birdemic: Shock and Terror. It’s gonzo energy, baffling stylistic choices, and heretofore unimaginable ineptitude will make you applaud too long and too loudly or caw like an enraged and diseased eagle. But prepare yourself for Birdemic 2: The Resurrection because it sucks in ways that you didn’t know things could suck. Throw in a little racial profiling and it all just comes crashing down around you. And then there’s Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle, which I strongly advise that you avoid at all costs. Watching it feels like what I imagine being slowly poisoned to death feels like.

Severin and Intervision have brought Nguyen’s trilogy together and rolled out the bloody red carpet with all the trimmings. The films look as good as they could possibly look and yet still do a disservice to the Blu-ray format thanks to the source material. Severin’s website boasts that these discs have 13+ hours of extras and I’d argue that the less you know about these films and the man behind them, the better. For me, much of the mystique of truly bad movies is getting blindsided and left to ponder just what the hell was going on behind the scenes. I legit hope that someone makes a biopic about James Nguyen someday. The cast commentaries from Moore and Bagh are fun to listen to though.