The birds are back!

Upon one instance of channel surfing, I happened across an amazingly bad sci-fi movie called Pterodactyl on Cinemax. It's about two groups of people in the Turkish wilderness who start getting stalked by a group of prehistoric birds called pterodactyls. The tagline itself is enough to make me gag: "Ptowering Pterror". (Note: the "P" is silent in "pterodactyl".)

Even the trailer is unwittingly funny-bad! Watch it at this link.

Some ingredients that made this movie so awful it's funny:

1. A hilariously cringe-worthy script filled with cliches and one-liners. Blonde bimbo: "I just wanna go hooooooooooooommmmmme!!" (they even have this line in the trailer). Heroine into walkie-talkie while trapped in a giant bird's nest crawling with hungry baby pterodactyls: "Will I wake up in bed and find out that I am, as they call it, tripped?" Gung-ho army officer to hero at the most inappropriate moment: "She's something special. Treat her good."

2. One-dimensional stereotypical characters: Handsome-ish professor with more than just research on his mind, sort-of pretty heroine with brains who ends up needing to be rescued by the dudes, blonde bimbo who takes off her clothes and screams a lot, bespectacled nerd who eventually gets a kiss from the blonde bimbo, black garang dude (played by Coolio) who spouts 90% of the smart-ass and/or cheesy one-liners, plus an assortment of baddies with foreign accents.

3. Bad CGI prehistoric birds.

4. Bad CGI prehistoric baby birds.

5. Cheesy effects and occurences, e.g. exploding giant birds, the obligatory pointless exploding car, gratuitous gore and ripping body parts, long sequences of shooting guns into the air while the giant birds swoop about, numerous separate scenes that were very obviously all shot in the same patch of field (why the characters had to keep defending themselves from the birds in the open field instead of running for the very nearby forests is beyond my comprehension).

It is an entertaining experience, that's for sure. If you're bored and want to snigger at something, leave your brain at the door and look out for it on Cinemax. Remember: evil is in the air...