Killing Birds

This movie is possessed by an agonisingly slow pace, unlikable characters, and an annoying plot involving a bunch of college students looking for a rare species of cardinal in the Louisiana bayou. The film is ambitious, I'll give it that. The screen writers throw in a bunch of horror cliche c*** that goes nowhere (hero the son of...that guy, some "historical" stuff pertaining to murders, facts about birds), you know, the kind of stuff that's supposed to come together at the end to prove something.

The conclusion is especially terrible. It wraps up no loose ends and you are left wondering what the hell happened and why the hell the entire movie happened at all. It is a wholly unsatisfying experience with no redeeming qualities.

I fully recommend avoiding The Killing Birds.

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.

Where the hell were the killing birds? There were birds, yes, but they didn't kill anybody! Argh! There is one zombie shuffling around in this film, though, killing off teenagers in some empty house. But don't ask me why or where that zombie came from, because once again, there's no explanation for any of the events whatsoever. So why on earth am I rating this fantastic film actually 3/10? Hmmm... Let me think. Well, the opening scene is pretty solid. It sets a certain dreary mood (and those teenagers haven't arrived yet at that point). Ehrr... It's got somewhat of an atmosphere to it, this movie, somehow. Uhm... What else? Huh... Oh, yes: It's Italian! There you go: That's 3 points. Yay!

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!

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.