User Reviews

"Killing Birds" is being belatedly marketed as a part of the vague "Zombie" series. It has nothing to do with any of them, but none of them have anything to do with any of the others, so that's OK. There *are* zombies in "Killing Birds", but that's not really what the movie is about. The plot itself may leave you a little confused. The first time I watched it I was lost, but eventually by reading up on the film I put the pieces together. The movie opens with a mostly unseen soldier who walks into a house and murders all of the inhabitants. If you didn't read about the film on the Internet, you might not know what the heck the murders have to do with anything, but to have the plot explained to you from an outside source helps (the movie itself is no good at communicating facts to the viewer): the soldier is returning home from Vietnam. He finds his wife in bed with another man, and apparently it's not much of a secret because a few other family members live there, too, and they're all home, including a baby. Oh, there are a lot of exotic birds around, too. The soldier kills all of the people, and even a few of the birds, except for the baby. As he's trying to clean up the bloody mess, the remaining birds attack him and peck out his eyes, which all birds in horror movies will instinctively do.

The point is, years later a group of students venture into the wilderness to study the rare "ivory-billed woodpecker". This will help them get an A in their classes, you see. They visit our now-blind soldier/murderer, who has aged into Robert Vaughan. It just so happens he's an expert on birds, and the kids hope he can help them find their woodpecker. After leaving him, they drive off into the Louisiana "swamp" and come upon the murder house, where they discover strange things and are eventually beset-upon by zombies. I'm not exactly sure why zombies, exactly. I suppose they are the reanimated corpses of the murder victims at the beginning of the film, and they are out for a little blood. Not that the college students make it difficult for them. They are the kind of horror-film characters who insist on splitting up when danger is present. They wander off alone to investigate strange lights, or to look for the car keys, or whatever paltry reason the script writer could come up with for them to be alone and defenseless.

I suppose this is all in the spirit of good horror movie fun, but I found it to be really boring and a test of patience. The characters behave like morons at all times, and do not respond to anything in any way that can be considered rational or even human. For instance, even before they get to the house they discover a corpse in an abandoned truck. Instead of turning back immediately, one of them says "That's what will happen to us if we don't KEEP MOVING!" Huh?

Then later, the first character to be killed by a zombie is murdered when she visits the cursed porch where the old bird cages are; another character sees her go up onto the porch, but refuses to react when she sees the girl screaming and knocking over the cages to get away from the zombie. After the zombie victim is already dead, then the girl goes and wakes up her companion: "I think something's wrong with Jennifer."

In my favorite example of non-human responses, two guys are trying to start a generator. One of them is wearing a long pendant, which gets pulled into the rusty machinery and drags his face slowly into the gears. For about two minutes, the other guy just stands there watching, wide-eyed, as the other one is mangled by the machine. Then he runs off to tell the others what happened.

On the plus side, the film is surprisingly well-lit (although it's almost nonsensical; rooms are lit blindingly bright when the power's supposed to be off). There's some nice cinematography. One interesting scene echoes the swinging light fixture at the conclusion of "Psycho", with the light intermittently illuminating an approaching zombie, and another involves the slow approach of zombies glimpsed through the windshield of a truck.

The film is obviously inspired by Fulci's "The Beyond", but the gore is really tame and there is very little suspense or atmosphere. Too much logic is sacrificed and very little is offered in its place. The soundtrack made me chuckle at first, then became rapidly annoying with the repeating Casio-keyboard synth lines and canned musical cues that went out of style in 1984. In one of the scenes, they rip off "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Swear to God! The conclusion of the film is truly laughable, as if they ran out of money and just had to stop shooting.

It should also be noted that, although the zombie makeup is pretty good, everything else in the special effects department sucks. There's a hilarious slit-neck appliance that shows up four times. There's an outrageous scene where a picture is supposed to "black itself out", but they just put some scratches on the film. One of the characters has a "hi-tech" computer that looks like a modern-day laptop crossed with a Commodore 64, and some awful superimposed graphics to go along with the computer scenes. The acting ranges from amateurish to just plain awful; Robert Vaughn appears to be half asleep, which is how you'll feel watching "Killing Birds". In the end, the biggest killing has been the hour and a half it took to watch the thing. Of interest to genre purists only, and even then, you probably won't want to watch this more than once.

Review based on 87-minutes long French version, titled L'Attaque des Morts Vivants. Which, incidentally, was badly pixelated.

Some of the most ridiculously overbearing music imaginable accompanies a throat slashing in the first scene, as a Vietnam vet returns to find his wife in bed, asleep, with some other guy. When he first tries to stab wifey too, he accidentally stabs one of their pet birds first, then proceeds to kill his wife, as well as two others who stumble onto the scene. In retaliation for killing one of their number, the other pet birds go on the claw-full attack. (This opening scene is pretty good, it has a 1970s grindhouse feel to it, but subsequent scenes look something on cable television in the late '80s. Was that the filmmakers' intent?)

Twenty years later, college students sent to research the Irian Jayan tweel-crested boobyhatch, or birds of some other kind, stumble onto the same house the killings occurred, and eventually are attacked by the zombies of the murder victims.

Zombie variation of Hitchcock's The Birds isn't entirely successful, but has a bit of atmosphere, but not really much zombie action though, mainly just a lot of lurking point-of-view shots, filmed through a diffuser.

The house is creepy in some scenes, generic looking in others. Killer birds in the first scene, then haunted house clichés in the middle, then zombies at the end makes for odd changes in the tone of the film.

Had this movie been filmed about fifteen years earlier, it might have been much better. But as it is now, it seems like a made-for-cable-television rip off of zombie movies, and The Birds.

Fred Brown comes home from the Vietnam war, finds his wife in bed with a new lover, and goes wild, killing her and both of his parents. As he cleans off his knife, a falcon tears out his left eye and blinds him in the other before he says goodbye to the son he's spared. Also: it's the same house from The Beyond!

That's just the beginning of this film, a movie that I can't even begin to piece together. Most importantly, I question why Robert Vaughn would have signed on for it. Did he need money this badly?

But don't get me wrong. This is a 1980's Filmirage movie with controversy at the heart of who created it. That means that no matter what, I'm going to love it.

There are three different people who could have directed this movie.

Aristide Massaccesi, who you probably would know best as Joe D'Amoto. Most of the crew members believe that he was the director. In an interview in the book Spaghetti Nightmares, he said, "It seemed to me that the most sensible thing was to give the job of directing the dialogues to Michele Soavi's assistant, Claudio Lattanzi, while I took care of the special effects scenes. In the end, I let Lattanzi sign as the director." He was also the cinematographer of this movie under his alias Fred Sloniscko, Jr.

Claudio Lattanzi, who assisted Soavi on his documentary film Dario Argento's World of Horror and was an assistant on his film Stage Fright. D'Amoto, who also produced the latter, offered Lattanzi a chance to direct Killing Birds when Soavi turned down the film as he was about to make The Church with Argento.

The controversy doesn't stop there, as even who wrote this movie is under suspicion.

Over Christmas of 1986, Claudio Lattanzi wrote a story called Il Cancello Obsoleto about a record producer who invites a rock band to a deserted house to record a tune, without knowing that Nazi soldiers are buried there. This sounds like a combination of Sodoma's Ghost - which wouldn't come out until 1988 - and 1989's Paganini Horror.

D'Amoto asked him to replace the rock band and the Nazis with killer birds, wanting to call the movie Talons. However, Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi claim that the movie was based on their script Artigli, which means...Talons.

The truth is probably that D'Amoto didn't want his name in too many places, so he just did what he always did - just about everything and either gave people credit or used one of his many names to cover the rest.

Anyways...

Twenty years later, a small group of college seniors, Steve Porter, Mary (Leslie Cumming, Witchery), Paul, Anne (Tara Wendel, who is also in Ghosthouse and Tenebre), Rob, Jennifer (Lin Gathright, who is also in D'Amoto's Eleven Days, Eleven Nights, Part 2) and a local cop, Brian, are looking for the green billed woodpecker, a rare species which went extinct four years after this movie.

Fred Brown, that man who went wild on his family, gives them plenty of info and they use his old home as a base, but find nthing but a rotting corpse. But then all sorts of even stranger things - odder than a corpse in a truck - happen.

That's when the kids start dying left and right, like a zombie beating Jennifer to death, Brian being burnt to death, Mary getting killed by a zombie, Rob getting choked by getting his necklace caught in a generator and another zombie getting Paul.

It turns out that Steve is Brown's son from all those years ago and the dad tells them that the zombies only killed those who were afraid of them. Well, yeah. They're zombies. Finally, he tells them to leave and we hear him scream. That's the end!

Charitably, this film is a mess yet I loved nearly every single frame of it. It's pointless and confusing and even its titles don't line up, because it's called Killing Birds-Zombi 5 in Italy and Zombie Flesheaters 4 in the UK.

God bless you, Joe D'Amoto.

Not much of a film. A group of students head into Louisiana territory to find the Ivory Bill Woodpecker before it is declared extinct. They meet up with a blind vet (Robert Vaughn) who had killed his wife and her lover, something that is not a crime in the South. He was blinded by birds. And that's about it as there are ghosts at the old house, visited by the group.

Was that a zombie an hour into the film? Film is a real stinker.