I was laughing so hard that tears the wire dvd were running down my face

One of the greatest worst 24 dvd movies ever made, "Birdemic: Shock and Terror," comes out on DVD and Blu-ray tomorrow (you can also rent it from Netflix). In commemoration of this the oz dvd historic day, here is my feature on the film's New York City premiere in March of 2010.
A few minutes past midnight on Friday, a man in a gray suit the tribe dvd and bright red tie took to the stage of the IFC Center's Theater One and, to the applause of the sold-out audience, proudly waved a wire coat hanger in the air like an athlete brandishing the Olympic torch. This borderline deranged behavior would only draw an enthusiastic positive response at two places: a Joan Crawford impersonators' convention or the New the wild wild west York City premiere of "Birdemic: Shock and Terror," a eco-horror romantic thriller that has been dubbed "the next hilariously great cult movie" by no less an appropriate outlet than Vulture.com.
The hanger-wielding man in the suit was "Birdemic" writer/director James Nguyen, a the west wing dvd software salesman by day who boasted that he "went to the film school of Hitchcock cinema" during the introductory Q & A. Arguably, he also could've attended the film school of Ed Wood cinema, since "Birdemic" feels far more indebted to Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space" with its blend of ultra-low budget filmmaking and cuckoo bananas the x files dvd ecological message, than anything by the Master of Suspense.
To be clear: I mean that as a compliment. I was laughing so hard that tears the wire dvd were running down my face even before the end of the opening credits sequence, which blends title cards like "Moviehead Pictures Presents... A Moviehead Production" with the most artless, endless and pointless driving scenes true blood dvd since "Manos: The Hands of Fate." "Birdemic" is the rare film worthy of comparison to "Plan 9," "Troll 2," "Battlefield Earth" and "The Room" as one of the best bad movies ever made. A still of any of its laughably unconvincing two and a half men dvd bird-related special effects would be the ideal illustration in any reprinting of Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp', " particularly if placed alongside the paragraph that reads:
"In na?ve, or pure, Camp the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the na?ve."
Ed Wood had aliens threaten mankind for their use of atomic energy. Nguyen has two different characters -- an ornithologist and a treehouse-dwelling hippie -- deliver subtlety-free pro-environment monologues that pin the blame for the avian chaos on mankind's wasteful habits. During his introduction, Nguyen cribbed from an old Jack Warner line in his claim that the film was "not here to send a message. If I wanted to do that I'd use a post office." Yet "Birdemic"'s shock and terror is rooted in a kind of didactic ecological panic that makes M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" look relatively cogent in comparison.
My own personal measuring stick for camp movie greatness has five dimensions: poor acting, bad dialogue, enormous plot holes, technically incompetent filmmaking, and inexplicable personal touches indicative of the na?ve passion Sontag talked about. "Birdemic" hits them all. It has a leading man (Alan Bagh) who always looks like he just woke up from a nap. It has lines of dialogue like "That was a great movie! 'An Inconvenient Truth!'" It has characters who make hilariously bad decisions, like stopping for a leisurely outdoor picnic in the middle of a bird invasion. It has a timeline that makes absolutely no sense -- in one implausible and very busy week, the hero makes $1 million when his software company is acquired by Oracle, invents a new kind of non-silicon-based solar panel, builds a start-up company around it, convinces a venture capitalist to invest $10 million in his idea, gets a new girlfriend and is attacked by hundreds of eagles and vultures. Finally, "Birdemic" has maybe the worst sound mix of any film that has ever received a theatrical release in major venues around the country. (You know what the last line of the film is? Me neither. I couldn't hear it over the sound of the wind howling through the microphone.)