Birdemic — Today’s Cult Film

It’s somewhat surprising that we’ve cultivated a genre of art, most often in film, referred to in the most casual speak as ‘so horrible it’s great’. Birdemic: Shock and Terror – the debut work of amateur filmmaker and day-time San Jose software salesman James Nguyen — is the newest cult craze to flood the midnight screenings. The film is currently spreading all over the country, quickly becoming today’s newest exploitation epidemic. Enthusiastic and often intoxicated crowds hoot and holler at Nguyen’s ingenuous effort to create a “romantic thriller”; pauses in conversation last too long, the story shifts in fragmented directions, and of course, birds fall from the sky and bomb stuff.

Channeling Hitchcock’s The Birds, Nguyen wrote and directed a story from an untrained standpoint, which often proves to generate a crap piece of artwork but in this case, turned out to shape a strangely compelling and utterly absurd, ‘so horrible it’s great’, film. That makes Nguyen part of a long lineage of eccentric filmmakers (originating perhaps in 1959 with Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space) who unknowingly create stories that appeal to the most ironic of audiences. But what makes a horrible film great? It’s hard to enjoy these films while watching them alone on Netflix — being part of the hysterical audience and collectively making a joke out of the film is a necessary condition for the pleasure. It shows perhaps how much an artwork’s value is formed and sustained by the intentionality of the audience. But, the ironized joke might also be a defense mechanism, because these films are far from easy to watch.

I wanted to argue that this whole aesthetic category of ‘so horrible it’s great’ is a contemporary phenomenon, but that’s certainly misguided. Few critics took French post-impressionist painter Henri Rousseau’s oeuvre seriously in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And I’m sure there are many others (I could imagine Roman politicians drinking mad libation, getting intoxicated on Sodom & Gomorra). And just like Nguyen, Rousseau thought himself as a realist concerned with romantic notions (nature, animals, the uncanny, etc.). Still, it’s hard to look at Rousseau’s work and believe there is much of anything realist about it. The critics felt the same way and laughed. But Rousseau might be different, he employed considerable technical skill to render his strangely gripping compositions, while Nguyen might demonstrate little else but a talent for depicting the hilariously weird.