Director: James Nguyen
Cast: Ryan Lord, Julia Culbert, Damien Carter, Marc DeNola, Alan Bagh
Screenplay: James Nguyen
83 mins. Not Rated.

I sometimes find that my willingness to embrace total crap for the reader to be a strength, but there are times I’m also ashamed of myself. This feels a bit like the latter.

In Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle, we meed Evan (Ryan Lord) and Kim (Julia Culbert), two young people who meet and spark a very familiar romance. Their blossoming love has to contend with the dangers of a squad of deadly explosive sea eagles who have targeted Santa Cruz, California. To survive the rampage, they’ll move (slowly) from location to location and encounter former survivor Rod (Alan Bagh, Bright), who can help teach them to defend against this new (but kinda old hat) threat.

The original Birdemic is a terrible movie, but one of the few that’s able to completely reverse trajectory and be a laugh riot, the perfect good-bad movie. Birdemic 2, on the other hand, showcases writer/director James Nguyen (Julie and Jack) at his most inept, trying to be a part of the joke, throwing whatever might work at the screen and resulting in a self-aware disaster that’s so boring it’s hard to even recall what happened. Birdemic 3, while better than its immediate predecessor, is just too damn similar to the original, resulting in a movie that’s just as bad as the original without any of the unintentional humor. Evan is a worse Rod, Kim is a worse Nathalie, and it plays out almost the exact same. In fact, Eric Swartz returns as a character only known as the CEO, but I’m not sure if he’s playing the same CEO in all three films or a different one, and that leads to so many questions. We also get the third time returning champ Damien Carter as the singer of the film’s notoriously bad songs, but they aren’t good-bad like in the first film, just a hollow copy.

I’ll give it this: the movie moves faster than expected. Even the first Birdemic has some pacing, but it’s so goofy and unintentionally timed in a way to embrace it. Birdemic 3 is no fun, outside of a returning Alan Bagh, but it least it’s over quicker than a lot of other schlocks. Bagh’s return is a welcome, he works with the material better than Ryan Lord, but he has nothing to do, and I would’ve thought that bringing him back into the fold would serve to close off the character’s arc for a trilogy capper, but this character could’ve been a new one and nothing would’ve really changed. Bagh deserved better. Hell, all of us that have stuck around deserved better.

If you haven’t seen one of these Birdemic films, you’ll likely scoff at the amount of run time that passes by before the birds show up, but I’m used to it, and honestly, the sounds that play on repeat are so grating and awful that it’s kind of nice not to deal with it, but again, that all depends on the value of the lead players. We’ve seen almost this exact same love story play out in almost this exact same way three times now, and the director/screenwriter doesn’t really know how to tell it any other way. It’s crazy how bad the acting was in the first film, and yet, I miss it. As mentioned, Bagh (and Whitney Moore) were more entertaining, and these two leads are dreadfully dull.

Look, I don’t want to shit on Birdemic any more, and part of me is thankful this trilogy has come to an end. There was an opportunity with the sequels to do something interesting, but James Nguyen seemingly never had three stories to tell, and the aftermath of the first film has left nothing behind to go on. There’s nothing new here, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. A “trilogy” of films “influenced” by Alfred Hitchcock’s work and being billed as “romantic thrillers” shouldn’t surprise when they recycle old ideas. At this point, they’re merely cannibalizing the goodwill of the original. Birdemic 3 is the middle ground, not as entertainingly weird as the original but far better than the self-aware first sequel. Still bad, no getting around that.

1/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

For more Birdemic: Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Birdemic 2: The Resurrection