In the opening flashback, a G.I. returns to his home in the middle of nowhere Louisiana and finds his wife asleep in bed with her lover. He kills them both along with her parents but spares his newborn son. The G.I. then has his eyes gouged out by some of the birds kept in a back porch aviary.
Years later, Steve (Timothy Watts), a graduate student at Loyola wins a grant to search for the soon-to-be-declared-extinct bird. His team consists of girlfriend Jennifer (Lin Gathright, TOP MODEL), computer expert Rob (James Sutterfield, TOP MODEL), photographer Paul (James Villemaire, MATINEE) and his comely assistant Mary (Leslie Cumming, WITCHERY). Also along for the ride is university paper reporter Anne (Lara Wendel, TENEBRAE) whose presence rouses Jennifer’s jealousy as well as concerns that her story could ruin their chances of publishing an article in Scientific American. Anne has managed to track down the last three people to see the rare bird; one of which is dead, another living in California, but the last – blind bird expert Dr. Fred Brown (Robert Vaughn) – still lives in Louisiana. State parks rep Brian (Sal Maggiore, ANY TIME ANY PLAY) also joins the group since he is responsible for the van they are using. Brown tells them where he last saw the bird and they take off: cue montage of the researchers taking photographs, shooting video, milling about, playing the guitar, exchanging meaningful glances set to one of the lighter Carlo Maria Cordio KORG keyboard themes.
As the sun starts to go down and the fog starts to thicken, the group find themselves lost. They stumble upon a truck with a rotting corpse inside. Surmising that they must really be lost if no one has managed to come across the body before them, the group take shelter in the now dilapidated house from the beginning. While the others explore the large house, Steve has visions of a zombie woman, the blind Dr. Brown, and Anne crucified against a wall.
Brian and Rob get the generator running and the group make sleeping arrangements. Jennifer sneaks off to look at what remains of the back-porch aviary and encounters a cobwebbed zombie. She barricades herself in a room but is killed by another zombie. From that point on, the rest of the supporting characters go in search of Jennifer and are either picked off by the zombies or by invisible forces until Steve realizes that he’s the baby in the prologue, Brown is his father, and the zombies are the people he killed who became zombies and killed his friends for no reason in particular.
A Filmirage production produced by Joe D’Amato and directed by Claudio Lattanzi (assistant director on Michele Soavi’s THE CHURCH and STAGEFRIGHT as well as Umberto Lenzi’s GHOSTHOUSE – also produced by Filmirage – here under the pseudonym Claude Milliken - with the rumored help of Joe D'Amato), I was intrigued by the clip seen on a Video Search of Miami sampler tape (the aforementioned scene with Anne crucified against the wall opening her eyes; Cordio’s scoring for that sequence taken out of context suggested it might be some voodoo zombie movie) and then by another clip on a German “documentary” on Joe D’Amato featuring clips from his films that appeared on some Laser Paradise DVDs. The trailer that appeared on some Media Blaster’s DVDs also successfully sells the film as a fast-moving, possible EVIL DEAD ripoff. The film itself (on DVD from Media Blasters/Shriek Show as ZOMBIE 5 – KILLING BIRD [the onscreen title is merely KILLING BIRDS]) is entertaining but not really the sum of its parts. The story by Lattanzi and frequent Filmirage dialogue coach Sheila Goldberg (who also served under this function in PHENOMENA, scripted the Ovidio G. Assonitis production BEYOND THE DOOR III/AMOK TRAIN and played a nurse in Michele Soavi’s STAGEFRIGHT) and script by Italian screenwriter Daniele Stroppa (who also scripted WITCHERY and CONTAMINATION POINT 7 for Filmirage under the pseudonym Daniel Ross) doesn’t make a lick of sense. There are ghostly visions and shambling zombies of supposedly good people who kill off Steve’s friends. Brown is obviously the guy in the opening and the birds of the titles have little to do with the film (also known as RAPTORS). Besides some scenic location shooting at Loyola University, another notable location is the house of Vaughn’s character whose exterior and interior will be recognizable to fans of Lucio Fulci’s THE BEYOND. The main house location is also quite effective with a seemingly sprawling floorplan not really cleared up by the camera coverage; making it believable that characters could wander off and not be heard getting killed off.
Vaughn has little to do and – from his comments in the disc’s supplementary interview – knew little of what the film was about to start with. Wendel puts the most effort into her performance and comes across miles ahead of the rest of the cast. Villemaire, the only actor other than Vaughn who is still working in films, sounds stoned most of the time. The rest of the principal cast are veterans of other Filmirage productions shot stateside and turn in mostly adequate performances. Leslie Cumming is just as fetching here as in WITCHERY and her line readings just as thick. Sutterfield and Gathright both appeared in D’Amato’s TOP MODEL/11 DAYS 11 NIGHTS PART 2 and are more than adequate. The weak link here is lead Watts who isn’t a particularly compelling lead (his running around with a variety of bewildered expressions worked in the trailer but not for a full ninety minutes); then again the plot doesn’t make enough sense for him to look anything other than bewildered (maybe it’s just as well that Vaughn’s eyes were hidden behind dark glasses the entire time).
D’Amato also shot this film under the name Fred Slonisko which he used on several of his Filmirage productions (his son, cinematographer Daniele Massacessi, worked on some Filmirage productions around this time and adopted the name Don Slonisko for one or two ventures as camera operator). The cinematography is typical of D’Amato’s Filmirage period; mostly slick, a little grainy but well lit without too much reliance on soft-focus filtering (which is only used here for some moody shots of the group trekking through the woods in thickening mist). The aforementioned Carlo Maria Cordio score [available on CD from Digitmovies paired with had some good cues but the Korg keyboard sounds are overly familiar (especially in the context of Cordio’s other work). It’s difficult to tell how many of the names of the crew actually belong to American technicians and how many are Anglicized Italian names since this film shares a lot of those techs with other Filmirage productions (including some shot entirely in Italy like STAGEFRIGHT).
Never released theatrically or on tape in the United States (despite the number of Filmirage productions shot in the states only a few like TROLL 2, GHOSTHOUSE, STAGEFRIGHT, WITCHERY and BEYOND DARKNESS made it to tape), KILLING BIRDS was mainly available before Shriek Show’s DVD release in the states as a bootleg of the Japanese-subtitled English language tape release (which I have not seen). The first disc release was a German DVD from Astro Films which was the cut German version with the cut footage inserted back in from a lesser source (according to reviews, some gore scenes had softer takes and the disc ended up inserting the more graphic shots after the softer ones). A subsequent DVD from X-Rated Kult Video reportedly has the uncut version in 16:9 and an Italian TV cut in 4:3 (the film was shot open-matte). The Shriek Show DVD is a PAL-NTSC transfer of a film that already looked soft. It is anamorphic widescreen with a stereo soundtrack (the film was mixed in Ultra Stereo). Besides the trailer (which has the onscreen credit “The Filmirage presents” while the print itself and other Filmirage releases just say “Filmirage presents”) and trailers for other Shriek Show releases, the only extra is an interview with Robert Vaughn who mentions that he made the film during a stopover in the states between other films (the interview cuts to an Italian poster that he has autographed).
Zombie 5: Killing Birds (Shriek Show):
amazon.com l
amazon.co.uk
DVD
Linear Mode
DVD