L'attaque des morts-vivants

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!

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.

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.

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.

In Louisiana, a soldier returning from Vietnam finds his wife in bed with her lover and he kills him, her and a couple of friends, but he is attacked by a bird and he loses his eyes. Years later, the bodies have not been found and the former soldier is the specialist in birds Dr. Fred Brown (Robert Vaughn), living in a house nearby the swamp. When a group of college students is assigned for a research of a woodpecker near extinction, they head to Dr. Brown's house to get some tips of how to find the rare bird. Then they drive through the swamp where they find the house where the murders happen and they decide to stay there. During the night, weird things happen and they are attacked by the victims of Dr. Brown.

"Zombie 5 – Killing Birds" is a stupid, gore and messy collection of clichés. The acting is terrible and histrionic; the screenplay is imbecile with mistakes in the continuity; the soundtrack is annoying and inappropriate for a horror movie; and the sets are very poor. Indeed it is an awful end of career of Robert Vaughn. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): Not Available