Killing Birds

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!

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.

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

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.

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!