Damien Carter | Through the Shattered Lens

2013’s Birdemic 2 picks up four years after the end of the first film. Society has recovered from the vicious bird attacks. Humans and bird are once again living as friends. Actually, no one seems to have learned a thing from the last movie because global warming is still out of control, blood rain is falling in California, and a woman is attacked by what she calls a “giant jumbo jellyfish.” This can only mean that nature is getting ready to fight back once again.

Rod (Alan Bagh) was one of the few people to survive the previous Birdemic. He is still rich and he is still dating Nathalie (Whitney Moore). They adopted Tony (Colton Osborne), the little boy who they rescued during the first film. At one point, Tony mentions that his sister Susan is now dead, having died as a result of eating the fish that Rod caught in the first film. (Apparently, this was an ad lib from actor Colton Osborne and, since director James Nguyen doesn’t believe in multiple takes, it made it into the film.) Rod invests in a movie being directed by Bill (Thomas Favaloro) and starring Bill’s new girlfriend, Gloria (Chelsea Turnbo). In fact, Bill and Gloria pretty much act exactly the same way that Rod and Nathalie acted in the first film, which feels a bit redundant since Birdemic 2 already features Rod and Nathalie.

Anyway, there’s a lot of scenes in the film that are meant to act as a commentary on Hollywood, with craven studio people showing that they are not capable of understanding Bill’s artistic vision. At one point, Bill talks about how he directed a movie called Replica. He and Gloria also pay a visit to Tippi Hedren’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame because it wouldn’t be a James Nguyen film without a Tippi Hedren reference.

Unfortunately, a blood rain causes the resurrection of several birds and two cavemen from the La Brea tar pit and soon, filming on Bill’s movie is delayed by the cast and crew running for their lives. It’s pretty much the same as the first movie, except that the birds are now bad CGI as opposed to clip art and, for some reason, there are also zombies involved. Why are the zombies there? Who knows?

Birdemic 2 was made to capitalize on the camp success of Birdemic and several scenes from the original film are recreated for the sequel, right down to several pointless walking scenes, another boardroom celebration scene and another scene in which the female lead strips down to her underwear and asking her boyfriend if he likes what he sees. Damien Carter also makes another appearance, singing a different song and leading a new dance party. (Nathalie is still the best dancer in the Birdemic films.)

Birdemic 2 is a bit more self-aware than the first film, which means that some of the attempted humor is presumably intentional. Unfortunately, the charm of the first Birdemic was to be found in just how cluelessly earnest it was. James Nguyen sincerely believed he was making a good film with the first one. With the second one, he seems to be trying to re-capture something that he didn’t really realize that he had captured in the first place. That said, even with all of the deliberate camp, there’s enough lectures about climate change to leave little doubt that, at heart, Nguyen was still taking this film far more seriously than anyone else on the planet.

He certainly takes his films more seriously than the people who appear in them. Much as in the first film, Whitney Moore struggles to keep a straight face and it’s obvious that many of her co-stars were specifically hamming it up to see what they could get away with. Alan Bagh, for his part, remains as unexpressive but strangely likable as ever.

Birdemic 2 tries but, in the end, there’s no beating the original!

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“Sex isn’t the only thing I care about. It’s just that I’ve always imagined myself falling in love with someone …. who’s alive. I know that may sound strange to you, but it’s just the way I was brought up.”

Sometimes, it just takes one line to transform a mere bad movie into a masterpiece of weirdness and that’s certainly what happens in 2003’s Julie and Jack when Jack Livingston (Justin Kunkle) attempts to explain why he’s having trouble with the idea of committing to Julie Romanov (Jenn Gotzon). Jack is a computer chip salesman who has been unlucky in love until he joins CupidMatchmaker.Com and meets Julie Romanov. He quickly falls in love with Julie, despite the fact that she refuses to tell him anything about her past and he never meets her in person. Instead, they spend their time walking around a virtual reality recreation of San Francisco.

Why is Julie so sensitive? Well, Julie is not exactly alive. When she was among the living, she was a brilliant computer programmer but, when she found out she was dying of a brain tumor, she managed to transfer her mind into the Internet. Her body may be dead but her mind and her personality live on, haunting dating websites. When Jack discovers the truth about his new girlfriend, he has to decide if he can be in love with someone with whom he can never have sex.

(It never seems to occur to either Jack or Julie that there also might be issues involved with someone having a relationship in which one person who is no longer among the living and will never age while her partner gets older and closer to his own death.)

It’s pretty dumb but it’s also so earnest and stupidly sincere that it’s kind of hard not to like it. Julie and Jack was the directorial debut of James Nguyen, who went on achieve a certain cinematic infamy with the Birdemic films. Just as the Birdemic films seemed to sincerely believe that they had something important to say about environmentalism, Julie and Jack has similar delusions of grandeur, with the main difference being that the message of Julie and Jack is a bit more heartfelt than Birdemic’s Al Gore-inspired preachiness.

The film has all of the things that we normally associate with James Nguyen’s work. The pointless driving scenes, the meandering travelogue shots of San Francisco, the scenes were everyone in a boardroom applauds, they’re all here with Nguyen’s other trademark obsessions. Because it’s not a Nguyen film without a reference to Hitchcock, Tippi Hedren has a cameo appearance as Julie’s mother and, of course, Nguyen includes a scene in which she talks about how much she loves birds. Do you think Hedren ever got tired of directors telling her to react to birds? I mean, she did make other films. Of course, other than Marnie and Roar, I can’t really think of any of them right now….

Anyway, Julie and Jack is silly and dumb and visually, it looks like a community college student film. At the same time, it’s so sincere and so cheerfully clueless about its inability to be the thought-provoking and mind-bending love story that it wants to be that I can’t help but like it a little. It’s a film that tries very, very hard and it’s difficult not to appreciate, on at least some level, the effort.