While the advent of high-quality, low-cost DV cameras certainly helped democratize filmmaking, putting the possibility of actually making a movie within the reach of almost everyone, and not just those people with loads of money or, in the case of Kevin Smith, comic collections to sell.
The downside to that affordability and accessibility is that the quality threshold has, inevitably, been lowered, and so for every Paranormal Activity, they'll be a dozen crappy-shot-on-DV-home-movies-that-should-have-remained-home-movies.
And yet, the success of the wonderfully titled Birdemic: Shock And Terror, written, directed and financed by "visionary" James Nguyen seems to counter that. The film, which cost just $10,000, has been packing them in in New York, with audiences apparently turning up in droves to witness the sheer awfulness of it all.
The BBC's Tom Brook filed this report. Here's The Guardian's take. And here is the trailer. On the strength of this, Nguyen might well be this generation's Ed Wood.
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