Made on a reported budget of $10,000 (£6,385), Birdemic: Shock and Terror quickly vaulted into the highest echelons of the best worst films ever made upon its 2010 release. Thanks to Birdemic's trailer – largely comprised of a scene where several almost-actors listlessly flap their arms at a handful of stock-still Commodore 64 maybe-eagles – the film immediately joined the likes of The Room and Sharktopus; films best watched drunk at 3am when your brain has lost the power to process competency.
And thanks to all this notoriety, there's going to be a Birdemic sequel. According to Dreadcentral, Birdemic 2: The Resurrection will be released in June, with screenings all over the world. This is uncharted territory. Films as bad as Birdemic aren't supposed to get sequels. They're supposed to crash and burn, living on only as punchlines on internet forums. After Harold P Warren made Manos: The Hands of Fate (until recently thought of as the worst film ever made) in 1966, for example, he quit the industry altogether in order to become a fertiliser salesman. By all rights, Birdemic's James Nguyen should be doing exactly that now. And yet, inexplicably, he's been given another go.
This, admittedly, is a worry. The original Birdemic was made in a vacuum. When Nguyen decided to write, film, edit and release a boardroom scene containing a full minute of bizarre stop-start applause, he did it because he didn't know any better. By straining at the limits of his tiny budget and considerable lack of skill, he accidentally turned out an unintentionally charming classic.
There's a chance that Birdemic 2: The Resurrection will see Nguyen either improving his technique or deliberately adding mistakes, Grindhouse-style, and there's nothing less charming than that. You only have to look at Tommy Wiseau to see how true this is. His film The Room has turned into a minor worldwide phenomenon, with monthly screenings still taking place at London's Prince Charles Cinema. And with it, the innocent joy of seeing the stilted acting, bad dialogue and horrific buttocks has diminished. Wiseau is in on his own joke now and, although his never-aired sitcom The Neighbors genuinely looks like something David Lynch would make if he was hungover, his attempts to capitalise on The Room's success have seen him ham it up unpleasantly time after time. The magic has gone.
But there's still hope for Birdemic 2. If the trailer is anything to go by, then all the defining characteristics that made the original so much fun are still firmly in place. The camerawork is scruffy, the sound quality is abysmal, there's a clip of a newsreader who sounds as if she's phonetically repeating a script that's being dictated to her by a drunk and, yes, the birds are still as terrible as ever. Better yet, if the scene where a bird splats into the Hollywood sign and makes a fart noise, it looks as if James Nguyen has called upon his considerable film-making experience to turn Birdemic 2: The Resurrection into a biting satire of the movie business. If his instinct for mockery is as sharp as his instinct for knowing how to make an applause scene, we'll have nothing to worry about. I can't wait.
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