Rather then end Shocktober or “Shlocktober” on a grim note with my disgust of Rob Zombie’s Halloween, I decided I’d end the countdown with a movie that personifies what Shlocktober is all about. So many times I’ve used the phrase “So bad it’s good” and this is one of the best of those kind I’ve seen in years.

“Why did the Eagles and Vultures Attacked?” Yes you heard me “Attack-ed”. This is the very phrase that adorned dozens of flyers handed out by Vietnamese born director James Nguyen at Sundance 2009 and that pretty much sums it all up. Some films are rushed, some struggle with a low budget, and some filmmakers are just incompetent. James Nguyen is three for three in that department. How someone with such little understanding of plotting, characters, and film in general even made a film boggles the mind. On one hand you have to respect someone for going up to the plate to take a swing. So maybe Nguyen just got hit in the head by a pitch, his mind certainly seems to operate that way.

I think it’s a good indicator that a film will be bad when there is a typo in the opening credits. “Supporting Casts” is what appears bold as day as it’s played over boring driving footage to a song that loops every thirty seconds… And the movie hasn’t even started yet. When it does we are introduced to a young software salesman Rod (Alan Bagh) who is almost as good an actor as board with a nail in it. Rod lives the sweet life in Silicon Valley and things only get sweeter when he reconnects with Nathalie (Whitney Moore) an old classmate and fashion model who does photo shoots at what looks like a one hour photo place. But just as their romance takes off so does a swarm of killer hawks and eagles that begin to explode all over the city.

Instead of continuing with a plot summary here’s a list of some of the mistakes, errors, and other oddities present in Birdemic.

• All of the killer birds in the film fly in place like hummingbirds. This is most likely done to save money on CGI, but the filmmaker’s explantation is “Global warming has caused them to be mutant, toxic, and flammable. That’s why, when they take a kamikaze drive, they explode, and when they drop bird fluid on some of the cast, they get burned.” Though I don’t really see how that answers the question.
• Characters are never seen reloading their weapons after firing off endless rounds. Also, I should probably mention that a popular weapon for most of the characters are coat hangers.
• Doves fight off eagles in the film despite the fact that eagles (and remember they are radioactive) are predators to doves.
• Sometimes we see people driving around in the background not reacting to the bird attack. I’m sure these people weren’t supposed to be in the film.
• A great deal of dialogue is inaudible and the room tone is never consistent.
• If I recall correctly it was supposed to be December and yet there is a scene at a harvest festival.
• When Rod is watching stock footage on the TV we can clearly see the Getty Images watermark emblazoned over it. I’m guessing the makers were probably too cheap to actually buy the footage.
• Constantly, characters who we’ve never seen arbitrarily appear to complain about global warming. The film An Inconvienent Truth is mentioned numerous times.

You could go on to a fill a book with all this insanity, Im just speechless. From a technical standpoint this film is no better than some family’s home movies. There’s nothing to speak of visually and I can’t recall seeing a film with so many sound errors. The room tone is always either too loud or just silent and the dialogue is a garbled mess. It’s not like these would be difficult problems to fix either. Did Nguyen really see no problems with this footage?

Birdemic is one of those films that isn’t as much a film as it is a display of how not to make a film. Fortunately, what this all adds up to is one of the funniest bad movies I’ve seen in a long time. You wanna laugh? Watch Birdemic it will make your night, With that I thank you for reading this year’s Shocktober series it was one strange trip but it’s done, happy haunting.

And here’s one last video to bug Sean with it’s improper formatting!

Never have I wanted to walk out of a theater more than when I saw this soulless piece of schlock. Ninety unbearable minutes of unbelievably unsavory characters taking part and being subjected to grisly, meaningless, violence. Some may argue that “Making it hard to watch only makes it more effective.” but to that I respond “You are retarded.” Yes horror movies are supposed to be sadistic they are “Horror” movies after all, but they should also mean something. You should care and feel about what’s going on, relate with someone in the movie and overall it should be entertaining and hopefully even innovative. None of these are traits which Halloween possesses.

The approach here was to start with the origin story of Michael Myers which of course as we all know by now is always a terrible idea. Remember the Phantom Menace? All this does is ruin the mystique of the character, plus what more do we need to know about Michael? We already saw a prepubescent Michael slash up his sister in the original flick do we really need 15 more minutes of that in a “re-imagining?” Surprisingly Halloween is actually a case where humanizing the antagonist weakens his presence. Knowing that Michael was from a broken home and picked on by bullies just makes me feel bad for him, I’m supposed to fear him remember? He was scarier when his sudden bloodlust came out of nowhere because it was so unexpected. What we don’t understand, that’s what we fear the most.

After about 15 or 20 minutes of origin story, we are then subjected to a painfully dull rehash of the original film. Laurie has to babysit on Halloween, blah, blah, teens having sex get murdered, blah, blah, he’s dead, he’s not dead, and I don’t give a shit. Like I haven’t already seen all this done better about a hundred times before. The only reason any of this even exists is is to pad out the running time. I mean you couldn’t just have a twenty minute origin movie now could you? Which brings us to the fact that this movie “Should not have been made!” Though with Rob Zombie’s involvement or not, this movie was going to be made no matter what.

Could this movie had been remade any better? Well seeing that about 80% of horror movie remakes are beyond unwatchable, probably not. What almost depresses me the most is how John Carpenter doesn’t give a shit about the legacies of his own movies. It’s like all he does these days is collect paychecks and piss off his fans. Not that it’s really any of his control with the studios and everything, it’s just the fact that it doesn’t bother him. I mean you’ll be hard pressed to find a Carpenter fan that likes or approves of any of these Carpenter remakes so stop making them!

Really it’s that damned Hollywood machine that deserves the most blame. It seems cliched to talk about how much Hollywood cares about money over artistic vision, but as far as I can tell that seems to the be the case in a nut shell. Sadly we are to forever be surrounded by terrible remakes of these classics. Though it’s up to both you and I to try and ignore them and look to other venues for our freaky fix.

After Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was such an unmitigated disaster, how could people want a third one? How could they want another Michael Bay Transformers movie so badly that they turned Dark of the Moon into one of the highest grossing films of all time? Who are these people? To answer that question, I sat down with my brother and dad last night and watched this self-inflicted wound all the way through.

Dark of the Moon opens with a big spaceship crashing on the moon. When CG John F Kennedy hears about this, he orchestrates the space race with the secret intention of beating the Russians to this alien technology. They get up there and Neil Armstrong looks around the ship and then they come back and the space race ends. Immediately the film shifts to present day, where we stare at the butt of this film’s supermodel girlfriend for Shia LaBeouf. After Michael Bay has his lust temporarily sedated, we catch up with Shia. Since the last movie, he’s graduated from college and is looking for work. He wants to be someone important, but being a recent college grad, he doesn’t have that many opportunities available to him. We learn that he met his girlfriend after getting a medal from CG Barack Obama at the White House, even though it’s established she works at a car showroom. What’s worse, Shia’s parents show up in a Sarah Palin-style tour bus. God, I hate these people.

So Shia goes on to act like a whiny bitch with his beautiful girlfriend and rich parents for a while. Meanwhile, that Tad Hamilton guy is in Chernobyl with the Autobots for some reason. They find some thing and then get attacked by Soundwave, who, if you remember, was a fucking boombox in the show. Now he’s a fancy car surrounded by gigantic metal tentacles, you probably remember those from the trailer. Optimus is pissed about something and so he goes to the moon and brings back Sentinel Prime, who was hidden on that spaceship up there the whole time. Sentinel Prime has some of the key components of the Space Bridge, the teleporting technology to go instantly between Cybertron and Earth. Also, Sentinel Prime is played by Leonard Nimoy, who played Galvatron in the real Transformers movie. I don’t think Michael Bay knows this, however, since he instead just makes every Spock reference possible. Sentinel Prime actually says “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” at one part. The gall of this man.

I guess Michael Bay liked Burn After Reading, because we learn that Frances McDormand is now in charge of the Autobots side of the U.S. government and John Malkovich is the weirdo who hires Shia. Malkovich acts like a hardass boss during the interview, but then quickly becomes a joke before disappearing entirely. He doesn’t really even matter, because Shia’s time at his new job is spent getting into homoerotic situations with Ken Jeong, who as it turns out worked for NASA during Apollo 11. Laserbeak, Soundwave’s cassette tape who is now simply a bird robot, kills Ken Jeong, so now Shia’s on the case. But he’s too late: Sentinel Prime betrays Optimus and joins with Megatron to summon the limitless army of Decepticons on Cybertron to Earth. Shia learns that his supermodel girlfriend’s boss secretly has been helping the Decepticons the whole time and she gets kidnapped. The Decepticons take over Chicago for some reason, and the U.S. government gives into their demand to exile the Autobots. They all get on another spaceship and then that ship gets blown up by Starscream (I think, it’s hard to tell).

With all the Autobots seemingly dead, Shia joins up with Tyrese Gibson and his old military buddies to head to Chicago. But when they get there, they give up because they didn’t think this through. Then, out of nowhere, the Autobots show up. They weren’t on the spaceship at all! Shia asks why and Optimus basically says no reason. Then there’s an action sequence for at least an hour. They spend forever trying to get to a certain building, even though they actually make it there to save the supermodel within minutes. They save her and leave and then realize they need to go there again. And it takes forever. Optimus flies around and gets stuck in hanging wires like an idiot. Some Autobot who’s like an old British scientist, complete with weird robot Einstein hair, gets killed and we’re supposed to be sad. Megatron basically sits there helplessly for the whole movie. Dudes parachute in and kill random, unnamed Decepticons. Sentinel Prime just stands on a building monologuing like an evil Spock. Eventually he fights Optimus. He’s about to win, but the supermodel manipulates Megatron into actually doing something, so he backstabs Sentinel. Then Optimus kills Megatron like a bitch. He does a brief monologue and boom, movie over.

It probably shouldn’t, but it still bothers me how far from the source material we’ve come. All the Autobots are douchebags, especially Optimus Prime. They’re just jerks to everybody. And you can’t even tell who the Decepticons are, I thought Soundwave died three times because I couldn’t tell him from the others. The humans are all horrible people, especially Shia LaBeouf, who spends the whole fucking movie whining and screaming. I hate him so much. The supermodel is worse than Megan Fox, she’s just meat put on display for us, often standing in sexy poses during the most dangerous situations. At least John Tuturro and Alan Tudyk (as his European manservent) seem like they’re having fun with their parts. But most everything that was wrong with the last movie is wrong with this one: the story is hard to follow and stupid, the characters are terrible and it’s way too damn long – longer than Revenger of the Fallen. The CG generally looks nice and it’s easier to follow now, especially because so much is in slow motion, but I still don’t really care.

But what about my brother and dad? They liked X-men Origins: Wolverine after all. They wanted to see this movie. I had to wait for them to start it. About halfway through the experience, my dad turned to me and asked why I wanted to see it. I told him it was to write about how bad it is. He accepted that answer. As soon as the credits started, they were up and out of there. My brother seemed excited about some parts of it, but when it was over he was quick to call it a bad movie. He just liked seeing fancy cars, I reckon. Later, my dad took me aside to talk about how bad the movie was. He even mentioned it to my other brother on the phone.

It’s just a shame, Michael Bay could have made a much more action-packed, bizarre movie if he stuck to the source material. He could have set it during the 1980s and the ridiculousness of it, things like the main villain turning into a gun that someone else had to fire, would be greater than anything in his film series. Instead, he created a successful franchise without a soul. A terrible machine that transforms hope and love into sorrow and loathing. And I hear we’re in for like two more of them.

Remakes, yuck! They’ve really taken over Hollywood in the past decade and from the looks of it are here to stay. But do remakes really make enough money to justify there being so many? I guess some do okay, but it’s my opinion that many underperform due to a general lack of interest. Surely they don’t make them for fans of the original films, because those are the exact people that don’t want them made. What it comes down to is a lack of imagination in the industry and good ‘ol fashioned American laziness, and this film is a shining example of both of those.

The original 1973 Wicker Man was a classic British thriller directed by Robin Hardy, written by veteran playwright/screenwriter Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth, Frenzy), starring Edward Woodward as the film’s protagonist Sgt. Howie and Christopher Lee as the primary antagonist Lord Summerisle. It was a chilling film about a British policeman drawn to the island of Summerisle after receiving an anonymous letter. The case is that of a missing girl named Rowan Morrison that the people of Summerisle refuse to acknowledge. Delving deep into the mysterious Pagan rituals of the islanders, Sgt. Howie’s investigation eventually takes a very dark turn, leading to one of the most disturbing endings to a horror film I can recall. Neil Labute’s 2006 Wicker Man, is a sloppy and meaningless mess that only seems exists so that Nic Cage can get a check and pay off his tax woes.

For the most part, Labute’s Wicker Man is fairly similar to the original but with arbitrary changes. Edward Woodward starred in the original so now the the main character’s name is Edward and the missing girl’s name is Rowan Woodward. The original film was set off the coast of Scotland, but is now on an island off the coast of Washington state. This change was clearly made so that it could star an American actor. The major crop of the pagans in the original was apples, but now it’s honey because Nicolas Cage’s character is allergic to bees and the list continues. Some of the changes seem to exist merely so the film isn’t an exact copy and yet they still manage to ruin all the meaning and symbolism of the original. One scene in particular is the “bug-in-a-desk” allegory from the original. In the original, there’s a child who keeps a bug in her desk tied around a small object and no matter what the bug always moves in the same direction, further entangling itself until it can’t move. This could be seen as similar to Sgt. Howie descending further in the same direction, only further cementing his tragic fate. The remake has a scene with a bird in the desk because “We wanted to see how long it could live in there.” This doesn’t mean the same thing at all and is incredibly stupid.

Another aspect that made the original intriguing was you could almost understand where the Pagans were coming from. Both Howie a devout Christian and the Pagans were firmly following their own beliefs. The Pagans weren’t necessarily evil, but these new people just seem straight up evil and Nicolas Cage isn’t religious, so that dynamic is gone. This leads to the new ending having none of the same impact. SPOILER AHEAD (go to the next paragraph if you don’t want the original ruined) The original ended marvelously with Howie being tricked into a wild goose chase so that a Christian could be sacrificed to the wicker man. So the Pagans trap him inside the wicker man and burn him alive. The Pagans then join hands in song as Howie recites bible passages and slowly burns to death. This time it just seems like they kill the protagonist because they’re bad guys. So they drone on and on about bees and shit and Nicolas Cage just screams a lot. So it has none of the same religious impact or scare factor and then it ends with the credit “For Johnny Ramone” weird huh?

The original is a classic and one of the best thriller/mystery films of it’s time, I’d recommend it to anyone, but this? This is just a quick cash in with little to no artistic integrity. So let me send it off with this weird montage that seems like it would make more sense in context but really doesn’t.