I haven't laughed this hard since... well, the first Birdemic!

abqstreetcar

I am a HUGE fan of the first Birdemic. It changed me. Never had I seen such an honestly sincere attempt at film go so hilariously wrong. I recommend it to anyone who loves so-bad-it's-good movies, it's so awesome.

Birdemic 2 isn't the perfect sequel to Birdemic, but it's still pretty damn entertaining. Rest assured that the sincerity of the first movie is still there, as is James Nguyen's heavy-handed touch (the main character, now a Hollywood movie director, is still a placeholder for Nguyen himself). The dialogue is just as insane (all the clumsy writing trying to explain what happened since the first Birdemic was definitely my favorite thing in this film). The graphics are still so awful they leave you clutching your sides. And characters are introduced and then immediately forgotten about, just like in the first movie. The magic is still there.

In fact, many of the elements of the first Birdemic have been reproduced in the sequel. Indeed, the story follows much the same arc as the first, with events occurring in the same order. I get the strong sense that Nguyen saw this as an opportunity not just to tell a new Birdemic story, but to essentially remake Birdemic; to do it the way he would have done it if he had had money and a crew the first time around. So some might look at this as a cheap attempt to just copy the first movie to capitalize on its success. And perhaps that is what happened.

But I'm going to give Nguyen the benefit of the doubt, because he does add a lot of new elements to this movie, and this is where Birdemic 2 really shines. I don't want to spoil anything, but the new things he throws in are insane and absolutely hilarious. In fact, strangely enough, the bird scenes were my least favorite part of this movie (and they were my favorite in the first) because they started to get rather repetitive. Fortunately, there is enough wackiness going on that it doesn't bog down the movie too badly.

So no, I wouldn't say it's the perfect sequel to Birdemic. But it's pretty damn awesome. The heart is still there, and the clumsy tie-ins to the first and the new stuff makes it totally worth the money I paid for an online copy. This is definitely a movie I'm going to watch a hundred times over, just like the first Birdemic. Like I said, it feels like Nguyen tried essentially to remake Birdemic but bigger and better this time. I'm not sure if you need to have seen the first Birdemic to really enjoy this, but there's a lot of silly tie-ins which you can only appreciate if you've seen the first, so I'd recommend it.

score 2/10

abqstreetcar 18 April 2013

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2784099/