10 Terrible Movies Everybody Loves
5. Birdemic
Not just content with bad acting like other low budget movies, try bad everything. Birdemic, after about 45 minutes of painful preamble between its principal players, is an apocalypse B-movie about attacking avians. Think Hitchcocks’ The Birds, if it committed just about every cardinal sin in the production playbook.
Audio is entirely inconsistent and badly-mic’d, continuity does not exist and the whole thing looks as though it was filmed on a single home video camcorder.
And with a budget of $10,000 it probably was. Director James Nguyen used his stars as his crew (often at the same time), refused to get a permit for any of the films locations and clearly uses people off the street as extras.
Most moviemakers would realise the CGI demands of a horror film about all birds in the world taking their revenge on humanity so perhaps it was a stroke of genius to spend as little as possible on them. The resulting cheap JPEG and animated GIF avians made Birdemic an online sensation, and the acid spitting and hilariously inappropriate plane sound effects just sealed the deal.
By the end of it, Birdemic becomes a gratifying watch where your only real personal investment is how much it does for your appreciation of actual cinema.