Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle

I've watched a LOT of bad movies, it's my favorite genre. Tons of titles most people have never heard of. Some are okay, some are amazing, and a precious few have zero redeeming features. Birdemic 3 is the latter. It really is awful. The first hour is mostly people walking or driving from point A to point B, and you get to watch on real time the entire journey, usually with no dialog. One scene in particular had the 2 leads walking across a empty lot towards a small building. They are seen walking, then you see the building, implying that is where they are headed. If you've ever seen a movie, you understand that is their destination. But we get to realm with them, all 200 feet, in silence, but from a few different angles. It takes about 45 seconds, but it feels like a lifetime. And this is one of many scenes that drag on to get the run time to 80 minutes. It's painful. Not to mention when their is dialog, it's about how humans are ruining the planet and causing global warming. That's fine if it's an Al Gore documentary, but this is Birdemic. I want cheesy special effects, low budget gore, and bad one liners. The birds don't appear until almost the 60 minute mark, and the movie runs just around 80+ minutes.

If you're a completist like me, and you need to watch all three Birdemic movies, just know this is by far the worst of them. It took me 4 nights just to get through it, as I kept falling asleep.

It really is that hard to watch as it has nothing to keep your interest.

All the same talking points. All the same overly long shots. All the same poor pacing. All the same wooden characters. All the same stilted dialogue. All the same unnecessary driving and walking. All the same million-dollar deals. All the same creepy guys staring at woman strangers who then fall madly in love with that guy - for no real reason. Nothing new to see here by the filmmaker who comes off as nothing more than an activist.

Global Warming. Climate change. Over and over and over again. Well the writer/director has no issues with pushing carbon emission into the air from his cars in his movies with his VERY LONG driving sequences, all the while harping the evils of just that.

"Birdemic 3 came out today, and Nguyen is already planning a fourth. But all I can think about is Evan Husney's sad portrait of a man who desperately wants to be a respected filmmaker but is so unable to let go of the movie that made him a cult hit that he sabotages himself."

This is what Ed Glaser wrote on Twitter alongside a clip of James Nguyen in a documentary from Vice, displaying his apparent inability to move on from the Birdemic phenomenon -- while leaving us confused whether he understands how deeply hilarious his movie about the attack of the killer bird GIFs truly is, or at least why this is so.

After all, the previous movie was trying to be funny on purpose. Alas, it is typical for a "so bad that it's good" filmmaker to lack the self-awareness to understand why people were laughing in the first place (just look at what happens when Tommy Wiseau, director of the legendarily inept The Room, tries to make us laugh INTENTIONALLY with The Neighbors) and sure enough, Birdemic 2 was just plain unwatchable.

Now, for some reason, Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle IS actually kinda funny.

Nguyen leans into what made the original movie so transfixingly terrible (the constantly shifting audio quality, white balance, and saturation seem all the more jarring with the improved picture quality) but isn't trying to be cheeky about it. The impression I got was that of a filmmaker who, deep down, does think this all looks really cool and that these sub-PSA "insights" about global warming and environmentalism are genuinely profound (one is reminded of bad movie legend Neil Breen, who still plays everything straight, possibly because he knows how hilarious that makes him).

But then, the movie does come with the additional (depressing) undertone generated by what we know from the aforementioned documentary: this is all Nguyen has in him. I was pondering this as I watched, but promptly forgot about all that when I heard a track by Melodysheep (composed for his sublime YouTube doc about life in the cosmos and its inevitable fate) among the stock music.

He's got taste, that James Nguyen.

I know film's sequels don't usually follow the success, but when the first movie was so bad I expected better. This isn't really a movie, it's more of a global warning propaganda video. So much emphasis on global warming and the destruction of the earth, it's actually quite depressing. Forget the wooden acting and the bad writing, and the fact that sometimes the scenes are interspliced so badly that sometimes the volumes change and the lighting, so you can tell they've just stitched 2 scenes together. I should have know what to expect, but even after seeing 2 other films of this quality, I really didn't expect it to be this bad. It's far worse than the other 2 put together. Personally I got to the end and was actually looking forward to the end of the world, just so I don't feel compelled to watch any more birdemic movies!!

The film making presented in this movie is horrendous. Somehow Nguyen has managed to regress as a film maker over his 4 feature films. This movie is not even so bad it's good. It is painful to watch and offers almost no entertainment value as it is somehow a worse retelling of the first film. Somehow the writer/director managed to cram more hamfisted and clunky dialogue than his previous works so that Birdermic 3 manages to be both simultaneously extremely boring and also insulting to the audience's intelligence. There is nothing new here to warrant viewing this film as the same issues of the prior 2 films in the series are also present in this film. The plot is literally exactly the same, the same terrible bird special effects are used and the same awful editing is present throughout. As a result, Birdemic 3 has no entertainment value whatsoever. Save your money and put on the first film with the saturation turned way down.