I make exactly 0 apologies for loving this film. Zero, nil, nada. In fact, I almost love this movie more than The Room. Almost.
If you haven't seen this film yet, WHY?! Like The Room it's comprised of condensed insanity with bizarre characters, incomprehensible dialogue, and some of the strangest directing choices imaginable.However, unlike The Room, this movie has exploding birds.
How to sum up this movie? I think comedian Jason Mantzoukis put it best when he described the first half as "an autistic man's pursuit of a beautiful woman", followed by a bird apocalypse. The lead character, Rod (Alan Bagh), is an employee of a company called NCT Software who runs into an old classmate, Nathalie (Whitney Moore), and begins a slow, arduous courtship of her while his company is bought by Oracle for A BILLION DOLLARS!, he starts a company that manufactures something called slr pnls which is funded for 10 million dollars, while she becomes the Victoria's Secret cover model for a damn good reason.
I'm gonna be upfront about this: I have a crush on this actress. She's adorable, and she knows goddamn well over the course of this film what a huge pile of crap it is. You can see in multiple scenes she's trying extremely hard not to bust a gut laughing at the absurdity of it all. Despite that, she is easily the best actor in the whole film. Also, in Max Landis' film The Death and Return of Superman, she is the most gorgeous version of Batman ever conceived, with apologies to Adam West.
Anyway, Rod takes her out, double dates to see An Inconvenient Truth (because Al Gore is the surefire way into any woman's panties), and on one occasion has to tell her not to touch a dead bird because it might be infectious. Oh, and there are also some newscasts foreshadowing that something is very wrong as polar bears are running out of food
And eventually Rod and Nathalie go to a seedy motel to do the deed of darkness. This all takes forty-seven minutes, and it's only after that exact moment that the birds begin attacking. The lesson here may be that Rod should never have lost his virginity, as that opened the seventh seal. I dunno.
Anywho, they meet another couple at the seedy motel who for some reason have a van full of automatic weapons, but they forgot to bring any inside, so in the film's most iconic scene they defend themselves from the birds with coat hangers while they get into the van. (Musical legend Weird Al Yankovic described it as "The best coat hanger fight scene since Mommy Dearest.") The remaining 30 or 40 minutes of the movie are Rod, Nathalie, and the other two people fighting off the birds, meeting various other survivors, fighting off the birds, meeting other survivors, and so on, and so forth until the birds just stop attacking for unknown reasons. Seriously, it just stops when a group of doves fly in from the ocean, fly over the van, and the eagles and vultures that have been attacking non-stop just take off and the movie ends.
After watching this movie you'll be forced to ask serious questions like "WHAT THE HOLY HELL WAS THAT?", "Hey, Rod owns a big house, why have they been driving around for this whole time?", and "Okay, what the heck was up with the forest hippie near the end??" I can answer all those questions right now: I don't know, and I don't care. This is not a movie, this is an experience. I cannot begin to stress enough how much you need to see this film. And if you pick it up from Rifftrax.com as a VOD from their live show last year, so much the better as you get the added comedy of Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett trying to puzzle out the deep messages present in this film. Seriously deep messages. Like down a mine shaft deep.
(Oh, and did I mention that there's a sequel? Stay tuned, because next time, we're gonna take a deep look at that one!)
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