Finally, global warming gets the kind of attention it deserves: public mockery.  Even West Village audiences have to laugh when nature attacks in James Nguyen’s grade-Z environmental “thriller,” though he seems to have produced it in painful earnest.  Forget “so bad it’s good,” Nguyen’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror is so bad it defies mortal powers of description, yet it rolled into New York’s IFC Center for a pair of midnight screenings this past weekend with an idiosyncratic buzz to rival Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. 

—–

Usually, a desperate subtitle like “Shock and Terror” is a sure sign a film will have precious little of either.  Indeed, such is the case with Birdemic, though viewers should be warned, the first fifteen minutes could potentially induce car-sickness, as the film slowly cruises the streets of a small Northern California town, constantly parking and stopping for gas along the way.  Our protagonist tonight will be Rod, a former computer programmer turned software salesmen, which we know because Nguyen relentlessly re-establishes his back-story over and over again. 

While Birdemic takes its sweet time getting going, Rod puts the moves on Nathalie, a fashion model whose last shoot was at the one-hour photo mart (I’m not making this up).  About a third of the way into the film you will start to wonder if these beastly birds are ever going to show up.  When they do, they make George Reeves’s 1950’s Superman look like The Matrix.  If the cheesiness of the visual effects were not distracting enough, it sounds like Nguyen cut the mikes before the end of each scene, because there are weird audio drop-outs throughout the film.  To be fair though, it hardly matters.  (more…)

It happens all the time in Hollywood: A friend has a dream of making a movie and wants to hire his friends as cast and crew. But most of the time, those dreams stay dreams, as the money to fund those projects rarely materializes.

For South Pasadena-based actor Greg Sestero, however, the dream became reality when his friend Tommy Wiseau managed to raise $6 million to write, direct and star in a movie called “The Room.” Keeping a promise he made years before when the two thespians met in a San Francisco acting class, Wiseau hired Sestero to be his co-star.

That should have been a happy ending, with the film either fading into oblivion or rising out of Sundance-style film festivals to become an indie sensation. Instead, “The Room” became wildly popular for an entirely different reason: it’s regarded as one of the great camp classics of all time, a movie considered so bad it’s brilliant.

Its monthly midnight showings at the Laemmle Sunset 5 theater in West Hollywood routinely sell out all five of the theater’s screens simultaneously, with crowds that have turned the viewing experience into the craziest interactive movie party since “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” (more…)