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.

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!

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.