Granted, mockery is the logical response to something like Birdemic, an eco-thriller in which our young lovers (he's made millions from his solar-panel start-up while she's a model who's gone from a studio in a strip mall to the cover of the Victoria's Secret catalog!) find themselves, like the rest of the planet, under attack by Really Angry Birds who can somehow blow up gas stations just by flying near them.
The special effects are of a quality somewhere below screen-saver, and the film generally indicates no filmmaking ability on the part of its enthusiastic maker, James Nguyen. But I think that at least some of the people who go to see Birdemic -- and The Room, and Dangerous Men, and After Last Season, and Rat Scratch Fever, and all the other so-bad-they're-endlessly-fascinating turkeys out there -- aren't just there to point fingers and laugh.
Say what you will about the awfulness of some of these movies -- and plenty have -- they're more interesting to watch than 90% of what's coming out of Hollywood these days. Major studios have pretty much abandoned the "show" in favor of "business," meaning supposedly safe bets like sequels, retreads, remakes, and comic-book adaptations. And even the occasional chick-flick or horror movie that doesn't fit neatly into those categories gets put through the studio machine, resulting in a mass of cookie-cutter movies whose screenplays all dutifully follow the Robert McKee/Syd Field three-act formula.
But as wretched as Birdemic is, no one's going to accuse it of being cookie-cutter. Plot twists might not make sense, but to an audience that's been numbed by predictability, any surprise can be entertaining even if it's completely ludicrous. Choices in sound effects or continuity or editing may feel abrupt and jarring, but hey, that's how Godard made his name.
I'm not trying to make a case that any of these hoot-fests are great cinema. But I do think that at least part of the reason these outsider movies are finding an audience is because mainstream cinema has gotten so very predictable and dull that some moviegoers want to be jolted or tickled or even just caught unawares. If, as the saying goes, history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, these laugh-inspiring epics may represent a cinematic New Wave that we're just not ready to quantify just yet.
In any event, check out Birdemic. No matter how you slice this one, it's some crazy shit.