Customer Reviews

Zombie 5 - Killing Birds

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

First of all, the current Amazon description -- supposedly from the back cover -- is from a different movie. This is actually a zombie movie. Well, not exactly. It's actually a killer bird movie. Well, not exactly.

OK, this is a prime example that long-lost 80's genre, the Incredibly Stupid and Mind-Numbingly Dull People Who Walk Around For Two Hours In a
Vaguely Menacing Setting movie. The entire movie comprises interminably long sequences of people stumbling around calling each others' names (Mary? Steve?) punctuated by brief scenes of bad gore. Here's the kind of logic you will witness: After almost every character has been killed, a man walks into the action and says "I'm glad I made it in time." HUH?!?!

The leading lady is insipid, the leading man is a piece of flotsam, and the rival for his attention is a dumpy girl with a mustache. The movie has all the pacing of a slug on valium. I know zombie movies. I love zombie movies. This, sir, is no zombie movie.

First off I will say this is NOT a film that is part of the Italian "Zombie" franchise. It was originally released in the United States as "Killing Birds" and the film on the DVD itself portrays this title. Shriek Show/Media Blasters Entertainment slapped the title "Zombie 5" on the box art to fool people into thinking this is a fifth entry into the series so they would sell more copies. Zombi 3 & 4 were both released in 1988 but Killing Birds was released in 1987...uh that doesn't make sense. Very deceptive indeed. What's next? Is Black Demons going to have the title Suspiria 2: Black Demons scrawled on the box!

Now with that out of the way, let's review the Killing Birds movie itself. Killing Birds was made when the Italian horror market was starting to die off. Many of the genre's worst films were released in this time period of the late 80's and the really early 90's. The genre greats like Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento were showing signs of decline. Even with all the other bad Italian films released during this period, Killing Birds comes out as being one of the worst. This film by Joe D'Amato was filmed in the United States with American Actors so it isn't dubbed like most Italian efforts. The movie however does start off promising as it has a Vietnam vet returning home only to find his wife and lover in bed together. He murders them and her parents that happen to pull up during the incident. While cleaning up the mess in the family Avery, the killer gets his eyes gouged out by one of the family birds. Other than poor gore effects, the scene was done well and the sequence is very Italian. Right after that moment the film takes a huge nosedive as it introduces us to a handful of college students (who can't act) on a campus that apparently are majoring in some "Bird" like degree. They get a grant to go find some rare bird which happens to reside near the house where the first four murders took place. They run into a blind Robert Vaughn who is wearing some dreadful prosthetic makeup over his eyes. I have always liked Robert Vaughn as he can usually make bad B-Movies bearable. Sadly he isn't able to here and his character is severely underused. While in the house, the students begin to encounter weird happenings and suddenly two stiff zombies appear. The zombies (who always appear with a very fake "White Light" behind them) come out every so often to kill off the students one by one. Towards the end when only two students remain, Vaughn appears again saying "It's me they want".

A lot of Italian films sacrifice cohesion of story for style but they are still great. Killing Birds however is very incoherent with no style. Who are these two zombies? Are they two of the people who were killed in the beginning? If so, why are they killing off students that had nothing to do with their murder? Are they vengeful spirits like in "The Grudge" who kill everyone who enters the house? Who knows as nothing is ever explained. Even the title "Killing Birds" is deceptive. That title and the rather cool cover art make you think this is going to be an Italian variation of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", which it is not. The beginning has the murderer get his eyes gouged out by a bird, but he wasn't killed. The ending (Spoiler alert) has a badly matted shot of birds flying in the air applied over a shot of a house and with a scream we can safely assume the birds killed Robert Vaughn's character. Ok...these Killer (not killing) birds killed one person! And again, what is the connection between the birds and the zombies? grrrr....this film is just so mind numbing! Yes it's bad but is it so bad it's good? Frankly no. Sometimes these Italian films are so bad they are hilarious. Zombi 3 and After Death (aka Zombi 4) are so bad they are funny and entertaining as hell, but Killing Birds is not.

On the up side, the DVD content is good. We get trailers and an interview with Robert Vaughn. The DVD artwork is great (other than the dismal "Zombie 5" tagged at the top) and Media Blasters did a fine job at remastering this dismal film. If you HAVE to see this movie and you haven't already purchased Zombi 3 and Zombie 4: After Death, then get the Zombie Pack box set as it is real cheap and then you can consider this movie as a "bonus".

I like bad movies. I like really bad movies. Some movies like "Zombie 3" are so bad that they end up being good in a comedic way. Some movies, like "Zombie 5: Killing Birds", are so bad that they're not even fun.

This is a case of false advertising. First, the "Zombie" part of the title. The first "zombie", if that's what you can call it, appears 45 minutes into the movie, and that one is only a dream, or vision, or something. The first zombie attack happens about 50 minutes into the movie. The second one about 69 minutes into the move, and that's about it. Under closer examination, the creatures aren't even zombies. Yeah, they're walking dead, but these are not the George Romero variety, which is something that even "Zombie 4" got kind-of right. They're more like ghosts, and really bad ones at that.

O.k., well maybe they just slapped the "Zombie" name on a movie that was really titled "Killing Birds" so they could sell it. Do you want to hear about these killer birds? The cover of the DVD shows the first bird attack that happens about three minutes into the movie. The second bird attack (which they don't even show) happens right before the closing credits roll. That's it. There are no killing birds in this movie.

So, what happens in the first 50 minutes of this movie? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The acting and plot make 1970's soft-core Cinemax movies look like Shakespeare. Basically, the plot consists of boring people walking around. That's it...really! If you like Zombie movies, avoid this. If you like bird attack movies, avoid this. If you like bad movie, avoid this; it is beyond bad.

You simply must hand it to the late Joe D'Amato. During his long career in the Italian film business, good old Joe made dozens and dozens of low budget films in genres ranging from pornography to graphic exploitation to extreme horror. "Emanuelle in America" is a Joe D'Amato production, as is "Anthropophagous," "Buio Omega," "Ator," and the best "so bad it's good" film ever made, "Troll 2." Sure, Joe made a lot of clinkers in his time, but what do you expect? D'Amato's films weren't crafted to win Hollywood awards. Most of his movies raked in the bucks in overseas markets, in places where the crowds filling the theater could care less about what type of schlock they're watching. A few of his movies surprisingly appeared on movie screens here in the States; I saw "Ator" at the local cinema in the early 1980s. Moreover, and probably most importantly, Joe's films also made money in America when the videocassette craze broke in the early 1980s. Yep, Joe D'Amato is a beloved figure to fans of schlock cinema, horror cinema, exploitation cinema, and anyone else who loves movies that wander far off the beaten path.

I should start by saying "Killing Birds" isn't a very good film. In fact, it is at times an atrocious piece of junk best relegated to the trash heap of bad cinema. "Killing Birds" as a Joe D'Amato film is closer to "Troll 2" than it is to "Buio Omega," with important exceptions. Where "Troll 2" was hilarious because of its badness, "Killing Birds" is decidedly bad in an unfunny way. Imagine, if you will, a story about a Vietnam veteran who returns to his house in the bayous of Louisiana only to find his wife cheating on him with another man. Enraged by this blatant infidelity, the vet goes on a bloody rampage. He kills his wife, her lover, and a couple of neighbors unfortunate enough to appear on the scene. The murderer does, however, spare the couple's young son. For some reason that I still cannot adequately explain, some birds living on the grounds viciously attack the vet, tearing his eyeball out of his head and thus leaving him crippled for life. All of these scenes unfold against the backdrop of lush foliage in one of those stately old mansions you often see in shows about the South. Sounds like a great premise for a horror film, doesn't it? That's what I thought. I was wrong.

Flash forward twenty years or so to a college campus where a gaggle of young adults plan an expedition into the bayou to research a biology project, something about the mating call of a rare bird. The group consists of your usual young people in a horror movie. There are a few loudmouths, the scholarly chick, the oversexed cutie, and a few other stock characters. You get the idea. After heading into the wilds of Louisiana, the kids meet a blind guy (Robert Vaughn!) who lives in a rotting mansion. This man spends his days recording the sounds of the wildlife in the area, so he gives the kiddies a few tips about what they seek and then promptly disappears for a large part of the film. Too bad, by the way, because Vaughn is about the only good thing about "Killing Birds." Even in the short time he appears onscreen he gets all the best lines, does a competent job with a bad script, and even manages to look and act creepy. Anyway, the young adults head out into the bayou, set up base in an abandoned house, and promptly die in cheesy ways as a host of weird zombies appear on the scene. It's all really lame in the strictest sense of the word, with cheap looking gore effects, bad acting, and dumb dialogue. The movie doesn't end as much as it skids to a halt.

Most of the elements we take for granted in other films fail to materialize in this one. The pacing of "Killing Birds" is glacial, a molasses like mess that moves with all the speed of a snail on tranquilizers. I didn't just glance at my watch once in awhile with this turkey; I looked at my timepiece so often I developed a serious case of whiplash. I would like to tell you the pacing was the worst part of the film. It's not. Check out the music for this mess. Never, in all my years of watching bad films, have I seen such a schizophrenic score. The scenes at the beginning of the movie, when we meet the kids, employs an interesting (cough) blend of bland pop music that you must simply hear to believe. Pure treacle of the most abysmal sort, like "Dreamweaver" but worse to the nth degree. Then, an abrupt change takes place. Maybe D'Amato dug up Jan Hammer to score most of the film because what we hear when the researchers encounter the zombies sounds a lot like "Miami Vice." I'm not even going to go into some of the outfits the guys wear in the film. Let's just say I had serious questions about their sexuality. I wonder why the girls in the group didn't have the same thought.

I can't give "Killing Birds" one star, though. The movie did manage to dredge up some creepy atmosphere in the end, and Robert Vaughn's appearance helped salvage the film. The DVD version is your typical Media Blasters/Shriek Cinema disc: trailers for several other schlock classics, an extended interview with Robert Vaughn about his role in the movie (!), and some other stuff. I cannot recommend this movie without feeling guilty, and I certainly cannot do so to viewers unaccustomed to cheesy movies. Horror fans should steel themselves for an unpleasant experience before popping this one in the DVD player. All others need to stay away. Far, far away.

Slow, boring film. There's some decent gore, which actually surprised me, but there's not enough of it at all. The first five minutes of the film and the last ten minutes are pretty cool. Other than that you have long, boring spots with a few random gore and zombie shots thrown in to remind you that you're watching what's supposed to be a scary film.

Also, I wish I knew what the deal with this being called Zombie 5 is. Did whoever labelled it as such think no one would notice that this movie was made in 1987, a year before the official Zombi 3 came out?

At least there are a few zombies, though it's not enough for me to really call this a zombie film. I have no idea what the birds have to do with anything. They show up at the very beginning and the very end. That's it. I was expecting some sort of zombie The Birds rip-off, at least. But nope. The birds are absent from the entire film. So, basically, both of this film's titles ultimately have nothing to do with the actual content of the movie.

I gave it two stars because I was entertained by what little gore there was, and I didn't really pay for it as I got it in a 3-pack with Zombi 3(good) and Zombie 4(mediocre at best).

ZOMBIE 5: KILLING BIRDS-Robert Vaughn (yeah, Napoleon Solo himself) must have really needed plastic surgery money to have taken this job. A soldier returns home after Viet Nam, sees his wife in bed with another dude and goes a little bit nuts, killing wife, the other guy, family , friends and everyone he can get his hands on except his infant son, who is given up for adoption. 20 years later the now adult son is making a documentary about an endangered Louisiana bird and so visits a Dr. Fred Brown, ornithologist and DUM DUM DUM..... his real father! (The crazy murderous loon who now studies loons,)He brings an annoying film crew with him and at some point for some reason zombies attack! They were the re-animated bodies of the people Dr. Brown killed all those years ago!

I think one reason people dislike this movie is that the title is fairly misleading. The monsters aren't the usual Hollywood zombie. They aren't the Modern Zombie ala Dawn of the Dead, nor are the they Classic Zombie, as seen in old movies like White Zombie; I Walked with a Zombie or even Zombies on Broadway. They are more like vengeful spirits who have taken on fleshy form to exact their terrible revenge against the guy who horribly murdered them all those years ago, In that regard it reminds me of the Barbara Steele treat, "Terror-Creatures from the Grave". The monsters in Terror Creatures were plague victims, intentionally infected, who eventually rise from the grave and avenge themselves against the descendent of the rotten louse that infected and then buried them under his castle.

There is a lot of cheesy acting and dialogue. The gore effects are few but reasonably well done.

If you are looking for standard zombie action as we know it today then you might want to give this one a pass. It won't satisfy that appetite for gore. But if you'd like to try something a little offbeat, a little downbeat and containing about a wheel and a half of Italian genre cheese, then you might want to look into this film. A more suitable title might have been, The Haunted Swamp or the Vengeful Bayou or something along those lines.

I can't tell you how many times I've picked up zombie 5 in the store and wondered if I should actually add it to my zombie film collection. I mean it truly seems to be a needed film if you already own zombie 2-4... but I heard numerous times that it 1. isn't part of the collection or 2. not truly a zombie film. Well, here is the answer for all of those who wondered as I did...

Zombie 5: Killing Birds is a zombie film and let me explain. If you are looking for an action packed thriller resident evil/28 days later/even a Romero film... this is not exactly it. If you enjoy the slow paced, low budget, bad acting, gore filled deaths like eyes getting ripped out kind of horror like Lucio Fulci made, then this is your ticket. NOT the greatest movie but entertaining. If you enjoyed sitting through "Hell of the living dead" then you might as well watch zombie 5 for some good laughs. Starts out really really slow but as it gets to the end it builds up into a true zombie movie. I say 2 stars... but to a cheesy zombie movie fan I say its a 3.

This movie was really lame... The acting was terrible. The story was really really really bad. The gore was cheesy, and the zombies didn't look cool at all. Avoid this one at all costs.

Killing Birds (Claudio Lattanzo and Joe D'Amato, 1987)

One of the extras on the 25th Anniversary disc of Zombi 2 is trailers for the other three films in the hastily-cribbed-together "series" (Fulci was only peripherally involved in the third, and not at all in four and five). Now, as much as I adore Zombi 2--it's on my list of the best movies ever made--I recognize that it is almost painfully cheesy. To me, that just adds to the charm. I expected the following films to be at best pale imitations of the quality of Zombi 2, and the trailers steeled me for these being bad, bad movies. And yet still I found myself stunned when I popped in Killing Birds (also known, entirely inaccurately, as Zombie 5: Killing Birds). This is a movie that not only suffers from mismarketing of the highest order, but is also well beyond painfully bad and into the category of mind-shatteringly awful. I should also note that I have a deep and abiding fondness for truly bad movies; I've seen Shriek of the Mutilated more times than I can count, and Kingdom of the Spiders has been a favorite of mine for decades. But Killing Birds doesn't have the level of cheesiness that would allow me to put it on a shelf with movies like that; it's a Z-grade giallo that someone decided to throw a couple of zombies into to try and attract a crossover market. And those killing birds? Oh, don't get me started on those killing birds.

The plot involves a baby who was kidnapped from a house twenty years previous by a mysterious killer in an army jacket who dispatches the mom, dad, and two random people who just had sex. Fast-forward to the present day (well, 1987), and a group of college kids, aided by an old, blind retired professor (is that really Robert Vaughn? Did he need the money that much?), go off to hunt for a rare bird, and stumble upon the house where the murders happened. I'm quite sure you can guess what the big plot twist is. And yeah, a zombie appears about an hour into the movie, and I assume he's got a pal (because there's one scene where there have to be at least two zombies involved), but the zombie connection here is tenuous at best.

The best part of this movie is Robert Vaughn's eye makeup; he supposedly had his eyes torn out by birds years before. It's not that the make-up effects are all that great (even in 1987, you'd already seen much better in Italian cinema), but that it changes every scene. There are a couple of side shots when he's wearing the dark glasses when you can tell they just didn't bother with make-up that day at all. Awesome. And no, I'm not being sarcastic--that really is the best part of the movie. The dubbing is lackluster at best, the script is a dog's dinner, the acting is bad, bad, bad. Claudio Lattanzi (later a directorial assistant on Soavi's La Chiesa, an infinitely superior film) is credited as director here, but it all starts to make sense when you realize the controlling directorial hand was that of Joe D'Amato, who made every Emmanuelle movie that's just plain awful. (In fact, he made over two hundred films, and of those I've seen, only one--1980's Anthropophagous--has actually been worth watching.)

A horrible, horrible piece of work, though (by a hair) not the worst movie I've seen this week. ½

First Off,this has absolutely nothing to do with the other zombie films,this is no sequel,the title Zombie 5 is very deceiving.

Second,This movie,its no hollywood production,no Grade A Actors,maybe the acting isn't the greatest,maybe thiers bad music at times,no state of the art storytelling.

Anyone whos expecting a zombie movie would be hugely disappointed in this film,which explains all the bad reviews,and with the very deceiving title Zombie 5, they deserve all the bad reviews and criticism

If you can overlook all that,this is actually a good "horror movie"
great lighting,great horror suspense,good camera work, like a true horror movie should be,if you are thinking of buying this film,and are reading the reviews,i say buy it,im sure you can get a copy for cheap.In my opinion,this is 1 of those movies,you have to decide for youself if you think this movie is good or not,because i read all the reviews before buying,and i wanted something to watch so i bought this,and enjoy it,to me this movie is more of a "Slasher Film" then a zombie movie