Most aspiring Hollywood directors have a clear-cut dream: packed premieres, adoring crowds, and the sort of feverish internet buzz among film nerds that a marketing budget simply cannot buy.
James Nguyen has achieved all that. But not quite in the way he expected. His horror film, Birdemic: Shock and Terror, is now 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 just a little to Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic masterpiece, 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 about $10 000 and crude special effects that reduce audiences to tears of laughter rather than terror. The action scenes are staggeringly poor and the script laughable. “[Birdemic] fails to deliver the terror but more than compensates with shock, ie 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 about by everyone except the poor, benighted souls who worked on the film. But Nguyen, who has cheerfully admitted that he “never went to film school”, refused to be beaten by the simple fact he had made a terrible, appalling movie.
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. Gradually he began to get a few midnight screenings. Stunned punters started to blog about their experience using Twitter and Facebook. The trailer became a viral hit on YouTube. More screenings followed, and Birdemic started to spread by word of mouth as a must-see movie for its sheer dreadfulness.
Last weekend the Birdemic bandwagon landed in New York, packing out two screenings at the Independent Film Centre in Greenwich Village. It now has dozens of other screenings scheduled across the US for the next three months from San Francisco to Philadelphia. It has even been picked up by Severin Films, which is hoping for a general release date later this year. Severin chief executive Carl Daft has called it: “Truly unlike any other film we have seen.”
Birdemic now has all the makings of a true cult hit, in part because Nguyen clearly 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. Cult moves like this evolve because the audience decides they are going to like it because it is so bad. We anoint them as cult hits,” said Professor Robert Thompson, a pop culture expert at Syracuse University.
Not that Nguyen is complaining. He has endured all the laughter and jokes at his expense with sheer delight, attending many of the screenings in person and soaking up the attention. Indeed he is now working on a sequel to be called Birdemic: The Resurrection. As 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?” – guardian.co.uk