Birdemic: Shock & Terror

(2010) writ & dir: James Nguyen; w/ Alan Bagh, Whitney Moore. No skin; a smidge of bad gore.

A nice young man meets a nice lady. They really seem to be having a nice time getting to know each other. A soundtrack that is purely dreadful, actors who can’t, a director who doesn’t, fx so bad they had to be done that way on purpose, and quite possibly the worst editing you will ever see. If you needed a movie to make fun of at your next party, this is your baby. Oh… and after an hour of pointless drivel, the eagles attack. It’s like The Birds – except these suckers explode. And poop acid. But they stop whenever it’s time for a preachy message on environmentalism. Woo… if you weren’t drinking at the start of this flick, you will be by the end of it.

Fiend

(1980) writ & dir: Don Dohler; w/ Dan Leifert, Richard Nelson, Elaine White. No skin; no gore.

Some guy climbs out of his grave and becomes a violin teacher… oh, and he strangles a few women… because that’s what undead violin teachers do. Meanwhile, the asshole neighbor gets suspicious. Despite the supernatural gloss, this is just your standard slasher formula, except slower. There isn’t enough script or budget to carry the feature length, so Dohler falls back on walking-through-the-woods padding. Odd enough to be a little fun for heckling, but really, you’re going to have to work hard on this one.

Alien Factor

(1978) writ & dir: Donald M. Dohler; w/ Dan Leifert, Tom Griffith, Richard Dyszel, Mary Mertens. No skin; no gore; no point.

Random alien beasties rip up some small-town folk. Only the crypto-biology nut can save them now. This is the sort of dime-budget drive-in drivel that fills the middle of a triple-feature. A sliver of a plot is sprinkled amongst immense amounts of padding, bad photography and ominous music. And the only payoff is some bad monster costumes and a few seconds of cute stop-motion animation. Going MST3K on this one is the only way to make it actually palatable… at least it does offer good material for that.