Birdemic 3 – Sea Eagle

Birdemic 3 – Sea Eagle, 2022, 0 stars

Birdbrained

Birdemic 3 is the worst sequel ever

Exclusive to MeierMovies, April 20, 2023

In attempting to critique writer-director James Nguyen’s Birdemic 3 – Sea Eagle, I find it helpful to borrow a quote from a film by a better director, Ed Wood: “There comes a time in each man’s life when he can’t even believe his own eyes.”

But we should be able to believe, as this is the third film in the series that began with Birdemic: Shock and Terror in 2010. So we’ve had time to prepare. And though the camerawork is better in this one, the story is almost a complete retread, substituting new characters and different backstories. Yet, astonishingly, Sea Eagle is worse than the second film, Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, which, despite its poor quality, at least had a degree of campy self-awareness. That isn’t present in Sea Eagle, which takes itself far too seriously, to the point of drifting into accidental farce. Except even the unintended laughs are gone this time, replaced mostly by boredom.

I can’t begin to understand Nguyen or his motivations. Outside of the movies, he might be a nice, talented guy. And he loves the environment and Alfred Hitchcock – something he likes to tell us. A lot. But he’s no filmmaker, as every frame of his films proves. From the inconsistent lighting and color correction (within the same scene), to bad sound mixing, to sound just plain dropping out entirely in places, to heavy-handed and downright incorrect messaging, to inconceivably bad dialogue, to inanely choreographed and nonsensical dance scenes, to the infamously bad CGI, Sea Eagle is the poster child for bad student filmmaking. Except Nguyen isn’t a student.

And then there’s the acting. Alan Bagh is back, briefly reprising his role from the earlier flicks. The lead this time is Ryan Lord, and if he had been any more wooden, Guillermo del Toro would have borrowed him for the title role in his stop-motion Pinocchio. The second lead is Julia Culbert, and though there might be an actress hidden in her somewhere, we never see it here, as she just doesn’t seem to give a crap, which might make her the second-smartest participant in this debacle. Who is the smartest? Whitney Moore, co-star of the first and second films, who apparently chose not to endure a third installment. That officially makes her smarter than me.

Sea Eagle is the final chapter in the trilogy, or so we’ve been led to believe. If it is, let’s hope the memory of these movies fades quickly, like the inexplicable and abrupt disappearance of the feathered fiends at the end of each Birdemic flick.

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For more information about this movie, visit IMDB.