In sports, there’s something known as a generational talent. That is the one player who is better than almost any other player at that time. There are good players. There are great players. Then there are generational talents. Think of all the people considered the greatest of all time. Now, narrow it down to the people who might actually be in the conversation for who could be the greatest of all time. In basketball, you get your Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Bill Russell, LeBron James, and Kobe Bryant. In hockey, you get your Wayne Gretsky, Dominic Hasek, Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, and Connor McDavid. They’re the guys who are the best of their generation.
Movies have the same sort of thing. There are good movies. There are great movies. Then there are those movies that define a generation. The same could be said on the flip side of things. There are bad movies. There are terrible movies. Then there are those generationally horrible movies that stand above the pack. Generationally bad movies that people still think about regularly, years after they were released.
You probably know the movies I mean when I say generationally bad. Reefer Madness, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and The Room are three such movies. Another one that could be thrown into the conversation came out a few years after The Room. It was The Birds, but if Alfred Hitchcock didn’t know how to make a movie. It was a little movie called Birdemic: Shock and Terror.
There was a sort of magic in Birdemic: Shock and Terror. It tried to be romantic, but the acting was so bad that you couldn’t believe there were any sparks between the actors. The effects were so bad that you couldn’t believe your eyes. The action was so nonsensical that you couldn’t understand how any of it could be happening. Wrap that up in a nice, little environmental message and you had one of the movies of all time.
Birdemic: Shock and Terror found popularity within the bad movie circuit. People had a blast watching it in all it’s painfully poor glory. I don’t think director James Nguyen understood why it was so special, though. Everything about it was bad. But there was heart to it. It felt genuine. It felt like a filmmaker trying and failing to make something good and doing so in the most spectacular fashion.
That’s why the sequel didn’t fare nearly as well. Birdemic 2: The Resurrection was more of the same, except it was self-aware of the fact that it was bad. That took away that heart, that genuine feeling. Things felt more intentional. There was some poorly done satire. There was a zombie scene. It felt like James Nguyen was trying to make a bad movie the second time around, where he wasn’t the first.
About a decade later, he would get around to directing a third film in the franchise, Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle. I’ve recently seen it after finding out it was on Tubi. It was more of the same from Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, except the self-awareness rose to new heights. James Nguyen knew he was making a bad movie. Everyone involved knew they were making a bad movie. All of them could have done better. They could have put in better work. But they were clearly trying to do bad work for the sake of bad work, thinking that was what people wanted. They didn’t seem to realize that people wanted bad, but they wanted effort and care at the same time.
The most notable way you could tell the heart was gone from the Birdemic franchise was the cinematography. The first two films were nothing to write home about, looks wise. They were some of the most bland, sterile looking movies possible. They felt like someone picked up a camera, chose a setting, shot it, and thought nothing of it afterwards. It was consistent, though. Shot to shot, everything looked the same. The settings had been changed enough that there weren’t any shots that looked completely blown out or, on the opposite side of the spectrum, too dark. Everything looked normal.
That wasn’t the case in Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle. There was no way to know what was coming, from shot to shot. Everything kicked off on the beach where one angle looked like the proper settings were put into the camera, while the next angle was so blown out that you needed sunglasses to watch it. That might be a slight exaggeration, but the contrast was nearly that different between the shots. It felt like zero effort was being put into the camera work.
This low level of effort was apparent in nearly every aspect of the movie. Not only were the exposures vastly different between shots, but there were shots with the back of stand-ins for main actors who looked nothing like the actors. I’m thinking of an early scene with the main character watching the news. You could see his face, then the angle switched to the television with the back of his head. His hair colour was completely different. He went from blonde to brunette between shots.
And it didn’t stop with the shots. It felt like no effort was put into the writing, as well. The original Birdemic had some environmental messaging throughout the first half, but it really ramped up when the birds started attacking. The group of survivors came across other people who would tell them about how the birds were affected by the poor environmental actions of humans. These lectures broke up the action in a way that kind of paced things out without bogging down the first half, which was a romantic character story. Not the best romantic character story, but a romantic character story all the same. Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle put a lot of the lecture style stuff into the front half, completely pulling down any momentum or entertainment value of the romance. The second half sped right by because there wasn’t a whole lot of time to let the audience sit between scenes of birds killing each other. Whatever decent pacing there was in Birdemic: Shock and Terror was gone by the time the threequel came around.
One other bit of the writing that felt way off in Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle was the inclusion of Rod. Each of the Birdemic movies featured a new romance. The first had Rod and Natalie. They were the main characters. The second had Bill and Gloria. They were the main characters, but Rod was friends with Bill and invested in Bill’s movie. Rod was around the entire time and felt like an essential part of the story. Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle had Evan and Kim as the main romantic characters. Rod wasn’t even a part of their story. They had zero connection to him. He wasn’t even in the movie until the bird attack happened in the last twenty minutes or so. Then he magically showed up to say he had been through it before and to run from the birds with the main characters. It was a weird way to bring the character back into the franchise, and it felt like a waste of time. They easily could have written him into it another way.
I’m not going to sit here and type out how Birdemic: Shock and Terror was a great movie. That’s not the case at all. It was bad. It was generationally bad. But the thing that made it stand out was the effort put into it. It was the care that James Nguyen had for his baby. It was that he had a story to tell and told it in a sincere, albeit bad, way. That heart, that effort, wasn’t in either of the sequels. Birdemic 2: The Resurrection still had some value to it. Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle was like nobody even tried.
Bringing this all back around to generational talents, I’d like to compare this to hockey. One of the generational talents I failed to mention earlier was Gordie Howe. The guy played for three decades or something. He left one of the greatest legacies of all time on the sport. He would be comparable to Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Mark Howe, his son, would be comparable to Birdemic 2: The Resurrection. Decent enough. Can’t live up to what came before. Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle would be the equivalent to a Funko Pop of Gordie Howe. It’s the same in name only. The generationally bad movie couldn’t produce any offspring that were anywhere near as genuinely bad.
Generationally bad movies don’t come around that often. There are maybe a handful per decade. Chances are that any follow ups to them won’t live up to the legacy that their previous installment laid down. Or, if the sequel is generational, the original wasn’t. I’m looking at you, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2. Generationally bad movies have that something special in them. It’s not always the same something special. But there’s that X factor that’s hard to replicate. Birdemic: Shock and Terror had it. Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle did not.
Now for some notes:
- I mentioned Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Reefer Madness, The Room, and Plan 9 From Outer Space in this post.
- Alan Bagh, Damien Carter, and Eric Swartz were in Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, and Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle. All three movies were also directed by James Nguyen.
- Cameron Palmer was in Birdemic: Shock and Terror and Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle.
- Have you seen the Birdemic movies? What did you think of them? Do you agree with my assessment that there are generationally bad movies? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. You can also find me on Bluesky and Threads.
- If there’s a movie that you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know on Bluesky, Threads, or in the comments.
- Yes, I have a next movie in mind. I’ve already watched it. I’ve already started writing a post for it. The next post will be about Second Glance, a Christian movie from 1992 featuring everyone’s favourite Christian movie actor, David A.R. White. Be sure to keep an eye out for that one.
