Jack Gayer on the saga of Birdemic and the man behind the “best worst movie ever”…
Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) is a godawful film by any metric. The film’s badness transcends your average bad movie and becomes hilarious. The phrase that gets kicked around a lot in this genre is “so bad it’s good.” Birdemic is more like “so terrible it’s amazing.” Much like when you encounter something actually amazing, when you find a film of this caliber, your curiosity is triggered. How did someone make something so atrocious? Are there people out there who are so blind to the awfulness they created? The writer and director of Birdemic, James Nguyen, may be that blind.
The Room (2003) is a fascinating case study in mind-bogglingly bad decision-making and lack of common sense. The Disaster Artist, the book that provides a behind-the-scenes look at The Room, was itself turned into an award-winning film. Admittedly, the film did sand down some of the more abrasive edges of writer-director Tommy Wiseau’s personality. In the book, we uncover an “artist” who is highly mercurial and unstable. A manipulator and a bully. A deeply untrustworthy and shady figure. Similarly, when you start looking into the creator of Birdemic, James Nguyen, he at first seems just endearingly out of touch. A Michael Scott-esque character. His joy over getting a film deal with Severin Films is touching. He’s the man who dared to dream. And he made the dream come true through hard work, pluck, and forking over his own money. When interviewers ridiculed his movie to his face, Nguyen laughed along with them.
Sure, this guy made a film that’s been repeatedly called one of the worst films ever made, but he’s earnest and can play along with a joke. He’s optimistic to the point of being delusional, sure, but he seems genuine. He loves film, and he’s just happy that his movie got made—enjoying any sort of attention that comes his way. Then you learn a little more. And a little more. A darker picture emerges. Allegations surface. Stories are triangulated. A narrative forms. “Who among us is perfect?” For those of us without sin, blah blah blah. Right. Tell that to the people who were harmed. For the uninitiated, let’s go over why the movie is such fun, laughable garbage.
To call the main characters underdeveloped is an insult to underdeveloped main characters. It doesn’t help that the male lead, Rod (Alan Bagh), seems to have been kicked by a horse or has a severe personality disorder. What Rod lacks in personality, he makes up for in his lack of charisma, and utter creepiness. He will later mispronounce the word “Vietnamese” as “Vetnamese.” An interesting word to mispronounce when your writer-director was born in Vietnam and immigrated to America as a kid. When Rod spots his love interest, Nathalie (Whitney Moore), he essentially starts stalking her from a restaurant. Rod and Nathalie have all the chemistry of a dead crab and a wet piece of cardboard (through no fault of Moore’s). Rod’s best friend is a creep with zero tact. At one point, when asked where his girlfriend is, he replies, “She’s taking a shit.” A real charmer, that one.
There are technical glitches galore, thematic underpinnings that make Showgirls (1995) seem subtle, and slobbering allusions that would make John Waters blush. Throughout the film, the sound cuts in and out. But perhaps the most bizarre bit of soundwork is when the birds make their dramatic appearance: they’re accompanied by the sound of fighter planes. When the main character’s company is acquired “for a billion dollars,” the clapping that follows goes on forever, but it also cuts out to people not clapping before showing them clapping again. Editor? What’s an editor? Someone surely asked at one point.
The film’s environmentalist message is about as subtle as the Bat Signal. Nguyen, either in an act of mind-boggling obliviousness or an outright lie, stated, regarding this environmental message in an interview with Josh Rubenoff, “I mean, I really don’t want to send a message—if I wanted to do that, I’d use the post office.” While it’s (not) hard to decipher where the truth might lie, it’s also worth pointing out that this quote is a perfect encapsulation of Nguyen’s approach to Birdemic. Take something he liked, i.e., Hitchcock, and render an inferior version of it. In this case, Nguyen has just reworded the famous adage about films not being about sending messages: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” It’s also possible he just bungled the reference.
Nguyen has incessantly stated that one of Birdemic’s inspirations—besides The Birds (1963)—is An Inconvenient Truth (2006). No kidding, the characters in Birdemic literally go see An Inconvenient Truth in Nguyen’s movie. Here is some sample dialogue from that scene:
Rod: “Man, that was a good movie! An Inconvenient Truth!”
Rick: “That is it, I’m getting myself a car that’s environmentally friendly.”
It’s also worth noting that Nguyen’s obsession with Alfred Hitchcock is fitting, as the director had a notoriously disturbing relationship toward women. How so? Hitchcock famously put The Birds actress Tippi Hedren through hell. For starters, Hedren claims Hitchcock sexually assaulted and basically stalked her. Threw real birds at her in the attic scene without telling the actress real birds would be involved. The scene took five days to shoot, leaving Hedren’s face scratched up, and it only ended when Hedren nearly got her eye pecked out. As a result, Hedren’s doctor told her to take five days off to rest. The doctor even said to Hitchcock, “What are you doing? Are you trying to kill her?” The Atlantic piece, The Baffling Cruelty of Alfred Hitchcock, by Matthew Specktor, goes as far as saying Hitchcock “was known to have walked a line between stringent and outright sadistic.” If you want to learn more about this, listen to the Behind the Bastards podcast on Hitchcock.
In Birdemic, Hedren has a small cameo from The Birds, courtesy of archival footage. Nguyen has never been shy about his love of Hitchcock and his romantic thrillers, which is curious considering another statement he made in the Josh Rubenoff interview. Namely, that he sees how Birdemic could be a franchise akin to The Terminator (1984) or Final Destination (2000). Neither of which is a “romantic” thriller by any stretch of the imagination.
Other “so bad they’re good” films still have redeeming features. Despite Miami Connection’s (1987) many, many flaws, the special effects were surprisingly good. Birdemic’s special effects are part of what makes it so funny. They are atrocious. When you see how they were created, it’s both unsurprising and deeply sad. As seen in the VICE documentary, The Worst Movie Ever Made? The True Story of ‘Birdemic’, we see Nguyen’s “home movie studio.” It’s his bedroom (possibly in his parents’ house). The “studio” consists of a computer that looks old even by late 2000s standards. Nguyen walks us through the process of editing. It doesn’t take long. He clicks on a file for birds, drags the image of a bird into the shot, then resizes the bird as he sees fit. It’s even worse than it sounds.
However, in an interview with ABC News with Sharyn Alfonsi, Nguyen claimed he hired a student from an art academy in San Francisco. Nguyen also said, “From a distance, those vultures and eagles looked pretty realistic…shocking and terrifying…like a 100 million dollar picture. Hollywood style.” As anyone who’s seen the film can attest, there is no distance from which these birds look realistic, shocking, or terrifying. And the only way they look like they belong in a $100 million picture is if the characters in that movie are watching an incredibly shitty movie.
Elsewhere in the ABC interview, Nguyen says Birdemic is supposed to be a “very serious romantic thriller.” The interviewer’s incredulity was about as subtle as the environmental message in the film. Alfonsi nearly bursts out laughing at Nguyen’s claim of making a “very serious romantic thriller.” She asks, “Did I miss the romance in that clip?” In the same interview, Nguyen admits that some people may be laughing at the movie, sure, but most are laughing with the movie. An odd assertion, as, objectively speaking, there isn’t a single, intentionally funny aspect of the movie. This also speaks to Nguyen’s ego blinders. With apologies to Nguyen, everyone is laughing at Birdemic.
The plot of Birdemic is barely worth mentioning. Basically, against all odds (the leading man’s paper-thin personality and penchant for stalking), a young man and woman fall in love. After they have sex in a seedy motel room, the couple wakes up to birds attacking their sleepy California town. They subsequently flee the motel for destinations unknown. They meet various people, and at one point, after rescuing some kids, they decide to go on a picnic. Because…well, the characters would have been safe if they’d just stayed in the car, so Nguyen had to contrive a way to get them out of the safety of the car and into the way of rising stakes. Regardless of how little sense the decision makes. The characters inexplicably love getting out of the car and venturing into nature. This makes for great fun while watching the movie. It also allows us to meet characters who sermonize on global warming and speculate this is the cause of the bird attacks. Mystery solved?
When you have a movie this good, and no one will buy it, what do you do? You take your film to one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. Even if this doesn’t mean actually getting it into the film festival. As covered in the VICE documentary, Nguyen promoted the film by driving around Sundance a minivan covered in fake blood and poorly made signs for the movie. Some of the signs were handmade. There was a bird attached to the antennae. The vehicle was blaring bird screeches from the car radio. Oh, and there was a sign for the film, with the title spelled wrong (“BIDEMIC”). According to the director, the police were even called over the fake blood, and Nguyen had to explain he was just promoting his movie.
Nguyen got incredibly lucky when he signed a deal with Severin Films. In the VICE documentary, we see how Nguyen really partied the night up, going to various bars and possibly strip clubs to celebrate his staggering good luck. Not long after Nguyen signed this deal in 2010, audiences around America started going bananas for the film and its mind-bending shittiness. Nguyen soaked all this up like a child who’d made a funny noise that made the adults laugh.
After Birdemic’s initial success, Nguyen was flying pretty high. Too high. And the sun came right for those wings. Wings held together by wax and hubris. During the midst of Birdemic’s unexpected success, he was contacted by Paramount Pictures about doing a screening of the movie, but nothing more concrete than that was expressed. In the VICE documentary, Nguyen couldn’t have been happier by the news, appearing like he’d had a few: stumbling over his words, struggling to keep his eyes open. A lazy smile sprawled across his face.
Not long after the Paramount invitation, Nguyen announced to whoever would listen that he had a deal with the studio. For one publication, he said the deal included a $20 million budget for his next feature. In another interview, Nguyen’s chyron hilariously describes him as a “software salesman” instead of filmmaker. Trying to play damage control, one of the documentarians, Evan Husney, tells Nguyen that no one announces a film deal before there’s a binding legal document. According to the documentary, Nguyen responds by saying when Husney was in junior high, Nguyen was already in Hollywood.
A couple of months later, Paramount passed on acquiring Birdemic. Nguyen took the news hard. He admits he had a “couple Bloody Marys” the day he found out. Despite this setback, the Birdemic franchise enjoyed some good news when an independent producer offered Nguyen up to $300,000 to help make the sequel. And so Birdemic 2: The Resurrection (2013) was on. On the set of this film, Nguyen, in a talk with Inside Horror, said that the plot of Birdemic 2 was as good as the original. Which is like saying the Titanic 2 voyage will be as much fun as the first.
After the sequel’s release, Nguyen acknowledged to the documentarians that he wanted to stop making cult movies and start making respectable ones. Films with budgets. Ones that “might win awards.” Nguyen follows up this statement by admitting his next film would be Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle (2022).
After this admission, the documentary shows an exasperated Husney setting up a meeting with ICM Partners—a talent agency—in the hopes that they could offer Nguyen some much-needed career advice. As Nguyen explains to talent agent Peter Van Steemburg his plans to make Birdemic 3 and hopefully get 10-20 million dollars for it, the agent’s face falls. Van Steemburg tells him point-blank that going into meetings expecting such a big budget, “doors will shut right in [Nguyen’s] face,” and that it’d be wiser to make a short film and subvert audience expectations of Nguyen. Further, if he makes Birdemic 3, he’s just going to be “the Birdemic guy.” A stubborn Nguyen indicates that Birdemic 3 will be the last entry in the franchise. Following that, he reasons the studio can do a remake. He then cuts the meeting short and thanks the defeated Van Steemburg.
Subsequent to the meeting, Nguyen is seen being adamant he doesn’t want to make a short film. He reiterates to Husney that Birdemic 3 will be the last in the franchise, and after that, a studio can reboot it. In 2017, Nguyen wrote and directed the short, The Man with the Wooden Face. On Nguyen’s YouTube channel, Movie Head Pictures, he released a short “director’s statement” on the short. One of the top comments on the video by @CharlesXavier asks, “So James, any reason why you uploaded this video twice on your channel?”
Back in 2016, Nguyen used the crowdfunding site Indiegogo to raise money for Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle. With a goal of raising 500 grand, he raised just under 600 bucks. He started a second fundraiser on Kickstarter, dropping the goal to just 200 grand. He raised even less the second time, pulling in just 230 bucks. The film would be released six years later.
From 2023 to 2025, he put out four more short films. In 2024, a teaser trailer for Birdemic the Musical was released. It consists of a man briefly flexing his wings. The trailer is set to “Adventure World,” by Roman Verkhorubov, who is known for creating royalty-free music. A few days after that, another “teaser trailer” was released. It features an AI man with wings saying, “It’s a birdemic, it’s a birdemic…who will survive?” Nguyen has also previously commented in Dread Central that he was working on yet another Birdemic sequel, Birdemic 4: Garden of Eden. In this piece, according to Nguyen, Birdemic 4 would be “basically offering a solution to fix climate change.”
To backtrack a tad, let’s unpack Nguyen’s character a bit. If you hadn’t picked up on it by now, Nguyen is no stranger to dubious claims. He stated in another Vice interview, “BIRDEMIC IS THE NEW BEST WORST MOVIE EVER,” that the Humane Society contacted him after seeing the trailer for Birdemic to ask if he used “real eagles.” Yes, and marine biologists and meteorologists were equally concerned with Sharknado (2013), we’re sure.
In the ABC interview, Nguyen claimed—while shifting uncomfortably back and forth—that due to the “success” of Birdemic, he got a million-dollar development deal from Severin Films for his next film, Peephole: The Perverted. A film that is absent from Nguyen’s IMDb and Wikipedia pages, which is to say, it doesn’t seem to exist.
The VICE documentary also has a revealing moment that’s all the more unusual for Nguyen to allow on camera. Early in the doc, we see how Nguyen is more than happy to let the documentary crew pack into his hoarder-style van (“production car,” according to Nguyen). He immediately encourages the crew to help themselves to some beer but says to keep it on the down low because of “you know…cops.” Shortly after this statement, while still at the wheel, we see Nguyen sip from a plastic cup filled with amber liquid. This will be the first of many times we see Nguyen with a cold one in the documentary. If he wrote the film while half in the bag, it wouldn’t be a complete shock.
Drinking. It seems to come up rather frequently with Nguyen and starts to add a new lens to his characterization. According to one story about a screening of the film at a bar, Nguyen was buying “everybody’s drinks” but couldn’t afford to pay the tab and proceeded to argue with the bartender as they held the director’s stuffed bird hostage. Troma Films associate (and one of the crew for the VICE documentary) Evan Husney ended up paying the tab. Husney, besides paying for the tab and later creating a documentary about Birdemic, also helped secure distribution for the film while he was working as a Troma Films associate at Severin Films. Nguyen even sits down for his interview for Strange Things Are Happening with a sizable glass of beer. He takes a sip, and says, “Oh yes.” In Michelle Tan’s gushing review for diaCritics of Birdemic, where they attended a screening with the director present, they wonder if the director’s “glow” is due to his excitement or all the “Tecate he’s been drinking.”
To understand how the actors felt about the movie and their experience filming it, we’re lucky to have the VICE documentary and the few times the actors shared their thoughts in other, somewhat unexpected places. The VICE documentary caught most of the events surrounding Birdemic as they were unfolding. And with the help of Nguyen, they wrangled some interviews with the main cast after the movie was made. At first, they unsuccessfully tried to interview Bagh after Nguyen set up a meeting in a 7-Eleven parking lot. When Nguyen told Bagh to say hello to the documentary film crew, Bagh responded, “I have nothing to say.” Nguyen followed this up with a backhanded compliment, saying how this wasn’t even Bagh’s 15 minutes of fame, but his “one minute of fame.”
While Bagh has starred in dozens of films and television shows after Birdemic, Nguyen may have been partially right on this account. In his talk with BuzzFeed Video, Bagh, while discussing the highs and lows of his acting career, would call Birdemic one of the highs. Fortunately for us, Bagh did eventually share some thoughts in the documentary. The actor reveals he was “a little shocked” when he saw the birds in the film, as he didn’t expect them to look so abysmal. He says when he asked Nguyen what happened to the special effects guy, Nguyen replied that he couldn’t afford him, and these birds “would do for now.” When the director asked him what he thought of the birds, Bagh replied that they looked great. Perhaps most shocking about this is how good of an actor Bagh comes across. How warm and likable. How unlike Rod he appears.
In the interview for BuzzFeed Video, Bagh reveals that after performing only ten seconds of a monologue from the film Boiler Room (2000), Nguyen told him he had the part in Birdemic. Bagh also says that Birdemic had a crew for about three weeks, and then, for reasons unknown, they were all “eliminated.” And that due to Bagh’s busy schedule of going to school, working, and filming Birdemic on the weekends, he almost fell asleep driving a few times. On one occasion, he had to “spend the night at a 7-Eleven parking lot,” which perhaps led to his reluctance to be interviewed there in the VICE documentary.
Moore provided some thoughts of her own in the VICE documentary. She admits that once the filming was over, she was excited to never see Nguyen again. She also states that Nguyen claimed he had an “awesome effects guy working on [the film].” Further, on the tongue-in-cheek podcast How Did This Get Made?, which deconstructs mediocre to terrible movies, Moore shared additional behind-the-scenes info, fairly diplomatically.
According to Moore, the first red flag was the audition being held in a high school parking lot. Another red flag she cites is the actors being denied a complete script while filming. Moreover, the use of coat hangers as weapons was improvised because Nguyen learned he couldn’t take apart a closet in a Motel 6 to acquire rods he hoped to make into weapons. So he stole some coat hangers. Moore goes on to say that she did the makeup for the movie after the first two makeup artists quit. Moore says that whenever the cast had questions about the film, Nguyen would respond with “cuz it’s a movie.” And on the issue of Bagh’s acting, Moore says that his performance was “80% actor’s choice, and 20% James [Nguyen] moving the dolly very slowly.”
Moore also shares some unflattering observations on the film’s commentary. She said that they did not get permits to film at specific locations; instead, they just showed up and sometimes got kicked out. She said that at one point, they were filming on a public jogging trail, and Nguyen started yelling at joggers who were getting in the shot. Moore told him not to yell at people who were not associated with the film. Nguyen’s response? He refused to talk to her for three weeks. Rather than talk to one of the leads in his film, he gave Moore directions using her co-star Bagh as an intermediary. Why Nguyen would want this attached to the film makes about as much sense as anything else in Birdemic. To be fair, you also have to wonder why Armageddon (1998) had a commentary where star Ben Affleck, perhaps while inebriated, rips into the movie and doesn’t make the director, Michael Bay, seem like the swellest guy.
Bonnie Steiger, who had a small role in the film as a victim on the English tour bus, has recounted her experience on Birdemic at length. None of it is good. According to Steiger, she was once contacted by an actress who was outraged that Steiger would work with Nguyen, calling him “lecherous” and “disgusting.” Steiger goes on to say the woman has a lawsuit against Nguyen for sexual harassment for an audition held in a men’s room. Apparently, no high school parking lot or 7-Eleven was available.
Steiger says that Nguyen never paid her or several others who worked on the film. Including children. She says, “He spends his money on the rental of the theater and booze and chips and shrimp so he can be the center of attention at the premiere…. James’ latest excuse is he won’t pay till he gets money from distribution. Well, that’s not what the contracts say. You can’t change a contract after it’s been signed by both parties.” Steiger says other lawsuits are in motion, and other investors should be wary. She warns investors, “Check out [Nguyen’s] pending lawsuits, check out his credit rating, view any of his films first. If you decide to give him a cent after due diligence, you deserve what you get (don’t get).”
While it’s hard to track down information regarding lawsuits against Nguyen, it appears he may be fairly litigious himself. Apparently, David Chadwick, the illustrator and author, was threatened with legal action due to alleged copyright infringement after his book poking fun at Birdemic was hit with a cease and desist. Although, according to the site that reported on this, “pbandawesome,” the “work is clearly a parody, and thus is covered by Fair Use.” And if you watch till the end of the YouTube video Birdemic 2: The Resurrection – The Search For The Worst – IHE by “I Hate Everything,” a man who appears to be Nguyen is seen yelling at the crew, “I create the franchise. Don’t you ever embarrass me and fight me again.” Requests to Steiger and Nguyen for comment have gone unanswered.
Birdemic is unequivocally a funny movie. For all the wrong reasons. It certainly takes a healthy ego to believe your art is worthy of compensation. After all, the act of making something up has no intrinsic value. A banana nailed to a wall and a Rembrandt only have as much worth as society deems. So this line can be as much a matter of public opinion as it is one of self-belief (or self-delusion). Sometimes a work of art is championed for its anti-merit. A bad song can be enjoyed with friends. But seldom do we want to hear more music by the same artist. Especially when the joke is ninety minutes long. At a certain point, the joke is on us.
At the end of the VICE documentary, Husney falls on the sword. He believes that Nguyen’s success can be partially attributed to Husney helping push the film into the mainstream. But Nguyen is not a victim of his own success. His failures can be chalked up to his lack of imagination, poor writing skills, and obstinacy. He refused to believe he made a bad film, and he refused to believe that returning to the same poisoned well would produce anything but birth defects for anyone who drank from it. Artists can grow, sure. Watch Arnold Schwarzenegger in Hercules in New York (1970). He’s improved massively from there.
Separating fact from fiction regarding accusations against Nguyen is tricky until more information is available. At the very least, Nguyen is highly difficult to work with. He may have a tenuous relationship with honesty and self-awareness. Whether it’s commendable or sad that he’s still trying to make more Birdemic sequels, in whatever form he can, is up to the viewer. The public will always have the last word, and artists have surprised us before. Nicolas Cage has done Vampire’s Kiss (1988), and he’s also done Pig (2021).
Nguyen’s story may not be over. It’s possible he’ll put out something that, if not award-worthy, is at least non-terrible. As the cliché goes, stranger things have happened. Until then, we’ll always have Birdemic and every strange and uproarious second of film it contains. With a gun to our heads, we couldn’t in good conscience say any of it is remotely “good.” Is there a glimmer of something better in it? Still no. Does it reward repeat viewings, allowing viewers to catch more off-the-wall nonsense? Fuck, yes.
Have you seen Birdemic? What are your thoughts on the film? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Jack Gayer
