Killing Birds

A lot of reviews criticize this movie and claim the zombies are only in the last few minutes. I just want to correct that and confirm that there are zombies through out the last half of the movie.

The rest of the reviews about the bad acting and loss of plot are pretty spot on.

The story is about a Vietnam veteran who massacres his wife and her lover after catching them while having sex. Many years later a group of students travels to the forests to investigate a seldom kind of birds. To escape from the up coming fog they flee exactly in the lonely house where the terrible incidents did happen! Blood thirsty zombies appear and kill everyone until two members of the group. The last survivors find out about the dark secret of the house and the forest and its birds...

One of the less well-known works of Italian exploitation-specialist Joe D`Amato. Maybe not as sick as his masterpieces "Buio Omega" or "Emanuelle in America", but still pretty creepy and full of suspense. The film could be seen as a mixture of John Carpenter´s "The Fog" and Lucio Fulci´s "City of the living Dead" and it has some nice gore scenes like a guy who gets dismembered by a generator or a teared off head. The students only differ from their names and their clothes, but they are by far not as dumb as the teenagers in the "Friday the 13th" flicks, what´s no mistake in my opinion! Robert Vaughn as blind and mysterious scientist is the definitive highlight in this film! Highly recommended if you like creepy stuff with some gore! I´d give 7 out of 10!

It's another late-era Italian horror film! For a change, this one involves a bunch of kids in a haunted house, a setting which definitely didn't appear in House of Clocks, House of Lost Souls, Witchery, Ghosthouse or House of Witchcraft. But hold your horses there mister, because this one also chucks in a slasher storyline (for a bit), and some zombies...eventually.

We start out in the late sixties, where a Vietnam vet returns home to find his missus in bed with another guy, so naturally our marine goes mental and kills the two of them, then another couple (in laws?) who are just arriving with a new born baby. The marine doesn't kill the baby, however, but when he returns to his home (which has an aviary outside), some eagles get loose and tear his eyes out. Any good Italian film should start with four murders and an eye removal.

We see the kid getting taken into care and then fast forward to 1987, where college student/bad actor Steve has just gotten the go-ahead to go and track down a rare bird called a grey-billed woodpecker, so he gathers together his crew of expendable youngsters, but not before Lara Wendel gets involved. She works for some college newspaper (I think), and has tracked down three people who have seen this bird. She's not dubbed in this one either.

Lo and behold, the only witness nearby is Bill Oddie! I mean, Robert Vaughan! And he's the blind psycho guy from the start of the film. We see Robert using two revox tape recorders to monitor various bird sounds and after an awkward conversation with Steve and Lara before a lengthy montage of our group of youngsters going around recording bird song in various locals which somehow reminded me of the Hafler Trio's field recordings. Man! I forgot to mention that one of our potential victims here is played by the "Muh Baybee?" girl from Witchery! Remember the Hoff trying to get into her pants in that film? Well, it seems that she got the part in that film based on her performance here. That's good stuff.

After finding a corpse in a jeep which the film doesn't bother explaining, our group end up at an old, dilapidated house, with an old aviary outside. This being an Italian film, the house is haunted, which leads to several scenes of the house messing with people's heads before the zombies finally appear, fifty-five minutes into the film.

So we've gone from slasher to haunted house and now zombie attacks, so that's all good as far as I'm concerned. This is when the cast start getting picked off too, as you'd imagine, with people having their heads caved in, throats ripped, getting burned and pulled through the roof via the attic just like in Anthropophagus. There's a couple of twists as usual (really far fetched ones, as usual) and although Robert Vaughn doesn't have much to do, his explanation for why anything was happening led to a good Italian head scratching ending.

Be warned: I probably like these films a lot more than anyone with a brain, but this is good bet if you're looking for a decent late era Italian horror full of lame fashion, prehistoric computers, a bit of gore and enough loose ends to something a something. I'm not sure of Joe D'Amato's involvement in this one, or how much of the film is his.

Man, reading the rest of the reviews, I might be the only person on Earth that enjoyed this.

Terribly bad acting is what annoys you here right from the start. The acting, along with the soap opera-like music, completely ruins the film before it even properly begins. I don't know by what standards the teenage protagonists were cast but they're NOT attractive and they sure don't succeed in making themselves appear believable. Killing Birds suffers a little too much from awful sound editing and low budget production values to make it worth renting. Luckily it got released as an unofficial sequel in the Zombie-series otherwise it was doomed to disappear into oblivion right after its premiere. At least now it enjoys a modest cult-reputation. Completely undeserved, because any other Zombie film contains more gore in the opening minutes than this production features throughout the whole playtime. The plot may have had some potential (the great Alfred Hitchcock already knew birds had something eerie forty years ago) but you're simply not interested due to the annoying characters and the tensionless surrounding. One to avoid at all costs.

Killing Birds (1987)

* (out of 4)

Incredibly bad, cheesy Italian horror film that's nothing more than a rip of Night of the Living Dead (again). A group of college kids travel to the Louisiana bayou for research and come under attack by zombies. There's also a side plot with a knife welding maniac and killing birds but none of this makes any sense. The gore footage is pretty good but the rest of the film is a real drag. Robert Vaughn has a small role in the film but adds nothing.

On DVD under the title Zombie 5 Killing Birds. Joe D'Amato directed some of the footage.