By Emi Gruender and Mia Hanuska
Welcome back to Groovy Movies, where The Shield writers Emi Gruender and Mia Hanuska scour Amazon Prime’s movie selection to find the most hilariously terrible movies! This episode, we strap in to view our very first Groovy Movie of senior year! With a high IMDB rating of 1.7/10, we dive into the horrifying world of Birdemic: Shock and Terror: featuring the quiet and far-too-close town of Half Moon Bay and the sudden invasion of a violent horde of birds. Two ordinary citizens— Dumb and Dumber—rise to the challenge, but one question remains: Will they survive the shock and terror that is… the Birdemic?
Episode 7: Birdemic: Shock and Terror
★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ — 2/10
*Beware! Spoilers below!*
Holy moly, we did not know what we were getting ourselves into. For context, during this film we took an entire 185 bullet points of notes, but we’ll try to summarize them the best we can. With an exciting start of a 2 minute driving-through-the-Santa-Cruz-mountains-montage and some very suspenseful music that gets cut off and restarted at least 7 times throughout the starting credits, the movie began very strong. The bold male protagonist, Rod, parks his car outside a diner in Half-Moon Bay. Yep, our very own Half-Moon Bay—along with Santa Theresa, San Jose, and San Francisco—is featured by name in this film! What an honor! In the diner, Rod recognizes the woman sitting a few tables away; they were in math class at San Mateo High School together. Ordering nothing, he leaves the diner after her, catching up to her on the street. They have an awkward exchange, and after some more chasing, Rod and the woman, Nathalie, finally exchange business cards. Because everyone carries business cards with their personal information on it.
After a drive through an intersection we startlingly recognized as one in Santa Theresa (and thus us freaking out because we recognized the intersection), Rod heads into work and completes a $1 million sale for his company! Only one person is at the office with Rod to celebrate this accomplishment though, and despite trying our hardest, we could not hear what his name was, so let’s call him Jeff. Oh yeah, if we haven’t mentioned, the audio legitimately sounds like it was recorded on the same moldy Taco Bell chilli cheese burrito The Gingerdead Man was filmed on, and then edited in iMovie. In fact, we wouldn’t doubt if the entire movie was edited in iMovie. There’s surprising jumpcuts in random spots, distracting background noise of each of the clips as the camera angle changes every two seconds, and the music is waaaaaaay too loud—when there is music, that is. Most times, there’s music when there shouldn’t be, and an unfortunate lack of music when the clips could really use it.
Anyhow, Rod calls Nathalie, a budding fashion model, and asks her to a dinner date at a Vietnamese restaurant after some not-very-PG comments about her new booking with Victoria Secret. Which she thinks is the epitome of charm. At the Vietnamese restaurant in San Jose, (THAT EMI RECOGNIZED AS THE VIETNAMESE MALL NEAR HER GRANDMA’S HOUSE) Rod shows up looking quite dapper and holds a singular rose for Nathalie. They enjoy their dinner over an absolutely riveting conversation that leaned more towards an interview where Rod told his beautiful date all about his very boring job. It’s here where our suspicions are confirmed: these actors cannot act for the life of them. Rod looks like he’s reading off a script, and although Nathalie’s acting is slightly better, neither them (nor any of the assisting characters) manage to convince us this movie wasn’t filmed as a school project. It looks and sounds like they’re trying to meet the criteria of an annoying teacher’s rubric. Post-dinner, the couple ends up at Coit Tower and sees some very impressively poor CGI parrots. Why are parrots near Coit Tower? Don’t ask us.
Now, we jumpcut to Jeff and his girlfriend, Maya. When we tell you this was a jumpscare. They are in a… choice position, wearing not quite enough for our likings. Maya hears her Nokia’s jingle ringtone, and picking up the call, it turns out she is Nathalie’s best friend. The two schedule a double-date for a couple days later, or at least, we hope so, because the music in this scene was so quiet we could almost hear the characters talking!
The next day at work, Rod’s boss announces that their company was bought for one BILLION dollars, and that all employees were to receive extra benefits and could retire early. The clapping for this announcement lasts over 5 minutes, because why cut out excess footage when you could keep it in! Finally, we make it to the double date, where literally nothing important happens. Yay, great plot! More unimportant scenes follow, until Rod and Nathalie go to an all-day pumpkin fest, the beach, and an Italian restaurant. Quite a busy day for the couple. At the beach, they find some more amazingly CGed birds; this time, they’re eagles, and lying dead on the sand. Later, at the Italian restaurant, they have quite an odd conversation—very interview-y, again—and hit the boogie together on the dance floor. Unfortunately, neither know how to boogie, and we found ourselves very glad for the excessive cuts between the singer, whose lips don’t match the lyrics of the song playing whatsoever, and the painful dancing of the couple. They book a hotel in Half-Moon Bay, and we sadly have to experience yet another minimally-clothed scene. For some reason, these budget movies love them.
Another cut! This time, to two minutes of eight completely silent clips of Half-Moon Bay. Now, you may be asking, “where are all the birds?” At this point, we’re asking this question too. It’s 47 minutes into the 1 hour and 30 minute movie: where are the birds the title promised? Ah well, lucky us! Right after the two minutes of silence (time for reflection we suppose?), viewers are jumpscared by BOOMS of birds dropping bombs on the locations in the aforementioned footage. Everything is on fire, which would be “terror”-inducing, except it looked genuinely like a meme.
Suddenly, the birds are swarming outside Rod and Nathalie’s hotel room, trying to attack them. In protection, the couple geniusly use the motel mattress and bedframe to block the window, despite the windows being perfectly unbroken. Once they manage to escape, they discover they’ve lost their keys, and force the room below them to take them in. In the room, we meet a Marine and his girlfriend, and all together they decide to flee to the Marine’s van where we learn he randomly just has an AK-47 and a pistol??? There’s a whole lot more to cover, but we don’t want to spoil it all, of course…
Ultimately, in case you couldn’t tell, this movie was just bad. Like, the other movies we’ve reviewed were bad, but this movie was bad. We could not wait for the ending credits to roll (which obviously had to come after three minutes of watching the same clip being played over and over again), and we haven’t waited this anxiously for credits to roll since Sharks of the Corn, and that film was almost double the length of this one. We wouldn’t recommend Birdemic: Shock and Terror to even our worst enemies, and we’d like to apologize to Mia’s poor parents who had to hear us yelling throughout it about its horrendousness. Genuinely, this movie deserves its 1.7/10 on IMDB. Don’t watch Birdemic: Shock and Terror if you value your time—or yourself.
OUR FAVORITE QUOTES:
- “Finding other food, such as seals!”
- “A day without s** is a day wasted”
- “Chicks love cars!”
- “If you want to get into their pants, you better have a nice hot Ferrari”
- “I was so lonely… until now”
- *Nathalie, in minimal clothes* “You look… fine” – Rod
- “Hey look, there’s dead people on the side of the road”
- “Its the human species thats a terrifying, menacing thing”
- “I’m tired of all the f**kin’ killing in Iraq”
- “They’re dead already!!!” “oh yeah ur right nvm”
- “I WanNA HaPPy MeAL!!!