Killing Birds

First of all this movie is not really Zombie 5 as someone pointed out Zombie 4 After Death came out a year later. Rather, both movies are just being repackaged and given new names simply to make some connection to Fulcio's Zombi 2. The only thing they have in common is that the dead do rise. I liked After Death a little, I thought it was a nice little zombie flick, nothing super great, but worth a look. This one, however, was really kind of tedious. Started promisingly enough with a man going on a killing spree after he finds his wife in bed with another man, but then it almost turns into a teen flick as we are introduced to the rest of the cast. The music even makes it seem like a teen comedy. Oh, and though it really is not clear at all there has been a significant number of years that has passed since the killings. Well we meet our young group of bird watchers and one annoying bus driver and a rather unremarkable reporter and all you can think is I hope they all die in extremely horrible ways. Not a good way to establish your characters in a horror movie is it? I mean when they aren't arguing over stupid stuff they are mumbling their lines so badly they sound like the parents in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Well they set off to find a bird which has not been seen in 20 or so years, and they run across a blind bird watcher. You'll know who he is and you will know what one of the gang of teens is right away so there is no real surprise at the revelation at the end. Well after they bother the blind guy they proceed to go bird watching get lost in the woods and find a house. They immediately set up camp here, despite the fact there vehicle is like just over the hill and if they would have continued searching for another 5 minutes they could have gotten out without anything happening. But hey, its a horror movie. Well finally some stuff starts to happen as people begin to die while their friends just stand there watching the person die. Of course they don't offer to help just standing there like idiots and then reacting well after the fact when it is far to late. My favorite being the guy who gets caught in a generator gear and gets ground up while this moron stands there not offering to help, then after the guy has had it he runs up stairs and says "they got him". I had to say, no they didn't the jerk got caught and you kind of let him die. As for the zombies they aren't in this movie much and they don't make much of an impression. The plot is practically nonexistent as there is no explanation for why any of it is happening besides the blind man's explanation at the end. Then you expect a rather grisly conclusion, but it never materializes and it just ends. Not a real zombie movie I say the makers were trying to make a movie more in the vain of "The Beyond". Of course that movie looks better, sounds better, and has better kills so there is no comparison there. I don't know maybe this was two movies that got bumped together. One film crew was making a horror movie, the other a teen romance, but they ran into each other and the teen romance people thought, a horror movie cool. That would explain the strange changes in the music in the first thirty minutes or so.

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.

Typical horror movie isolates a bland group of characters in a seemingly unoccupied villa (which they run across after getting lost in the course of a bird-watching expedition), then throws some zombies at them trying to spice things up, but unfortunately the gore is none-too-convincing. There are occasional moments of tension, but not enough to merit a rating higher than *1/2. Sorry.

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.

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.