Zombie 5: Killing Birds (1987) The incredible thing
about Zombie 5: Killing Birds is that it manages to disappoint both fans of zombie movies and fans of
killing bird movies. I can understand commercially why you would want to title
your movie so that it appears to be related to the Zombie series of films since four other entirely disparate films of varying quality
found an audience that had a high tolerance for increasingly low quality
outings, culminating with the Jeff Stryker-led Zombie 4: After Death. What better way to get us zombie zombies to sample a movie that we would have
otherwise ignored like it was Hitcher In The Dark, than to slap a "Zombie 5" on the cover and put Robert Vaughn's name above the
title?
To be honest, your disappointment over the zombie action in this movie may
depend on what sort of zombie action you're actually expecting in this movie.
Those of us who have been at this sort of thing for years now have long ago
realized that if a zombie movie features a guy getting his eye clawed out by a
large bird on the front of the DVD, then the odds are that the army of the
undead featured in said movie probably won't be much beyond one or two guys, no
doubt reanimated by the crabby spirits of some dead birds, stumbling around
through the dark, arms outstretched as they attempt to wreak a terribly
underpowered vengeance on a series of ugly kids dressed in late eighties garb. Of course the actual origin of the zombies won't be that clear, but I've always
used movies like this where the director sees himself more as an idea man (give
me a few zombies haunting the bayou and some large birds that look scary!) than
as a detail guy (who knows why these zombies are there or what the birds have
to do with anything, this is the spirit world we're dealing with, not a
how-to-manual!) as way to keep my own brain limber as I try to give reason to
what transpires on screen. (I pretty much failed with this one though.) I also mentioned that fans of killing birds movies would likely be disappointed
as well. That's probably not as big a deal since the movie wasn't called Killing Birds 5: The Zombies, but there may be a few people out there that were hoping for flocks of birds
to relentlessly peck and poop on folks throughout the film. Sadly, your best
bet for that sort of avian action is Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, which was basically Night Of The Living Dead, but with birds and Tippi Hedren. The bird action was surprisingly minimal in
this one (okay, the action in general was surprisingly minimal, but how hard is
it to rent a couple of parrots and shoot them from various angles so they look
enraged?), but you do get a guy's eyes poked out and a rather brief graphic
shot of his eyeballs kind of hanging out. It happens in the first ten minutes
of the movie, so don't think that's the beginning of a bird vs. man war for
dominance, because the rest of the movie involves a bunch of college kids at an
old house getting killed in every manner imaginable except by bird.  The film's real origins are revealed in the opening credits (except for all the
pseudonyms used by people like co-director Joe D'Amato) when we see that the
title is simply Killing Birds. The credits serve as a prologue and depict a Vietnam vet coming back home
from the war, having hitched a ride in a semi back to his Louisiana bayou home
where his loving wife waits breathlessly for his homecoming as she sleeps
soundly in their bed with her new lover. The vet sees this as he enters their
bedroom and luckily for him, he is still armed with his knife and is still the
perfect commie killing machine that this country made him and he cuts the
throat of the guy, then chases the wife down and fixes, I mean finishes, her
off. And just for good measure he kills her parents, too. And just for double
good measure he kills his pet birds because you know those pet birds were all
for his old lady's affair.
He spares his son's life (this guy is a veteran, not a monster!), but gets his
eyes pecked out by some birds that he didn't get around to killing yet. We last
see him at the hospital with his kid and his eyes are all bandaged up.
Co-directors D'Amato and Claudio Lattanzi (the real question this movie raises
is whether the movie would have been better or worse if D'Amato had just done
it himself without writer-producer Lattanzi's help) chose to shoot the entire
prologue without ever showing the Vietnam vet's face (at least until his eyes
were gouged out) which to me only makes sense if you're trying to keep his
identity a secret. Since we know that the blind vet grows up to be a blind
Robert Vaughn, what's the point? There's no suspense created by this trick and
it's merely distracting in this context.  Back in the present on a college campus a young man in flamboyant peach colored
dress slacks (Steve) gets some great news. He just got word that his grant
request has been approved so now he'll have the money and equipment to go do
some bird research in the spooky swamp with a bunch of his annoying friends.
He's even gotten it worked out so that if the article they produce is any good
(any bets on that?) that it will be published in Scientific American. (Do you think their subscription renewal letters say something like "featured
in such low budget Italian horror films as Killing Birds, aka Zombie 5: Killing Birds" or do all their readers already know that?)
Steve rapidly assembles his crack team of researchers including a computer whiz
who hauls around an embarrassingly primitive laptop computer. We know he's a
wizard with the thing because he's able to animate two stick figures having sex
on it. I would say that we shouldn't laugh and that he's probably a billionaire
now, but he got killed later on in the movie and that's why computer porn was
never invented. Along for the ride with a couple of nondescript males and
females is the reporter for the college newspaper, The Witness (referred to by campus wags no doubt as The Witless). Other than Robert Vaughn, she's the only familiar face in this one as she's
played by Lara Wendel. Though you'd have to have actually seen The Red Monks or Ghosthouse or remember her from smaller roles in Tenebre or Federico Fellini's Intervista (that can't possibly be right, can it?) to know who the hell she is. They also pick up a guy employed by the state conservation agency named Brian
who has to come along and drive the state van that Steve and his team of
forgettable friends will use to travel into the bayou where they might be able
to finally locate that ivory-billed woodpecker they've been babbling about.
Even in a cast of unlikable jerks and homely nobodies, Brian stands out and you
eagerly anticipate his demise. When he is finally set on fire later on, we've
put up with his periodically idiotic comments about women and a scary scene
where he plays the harmonica for so long, it's not really the feel-good moment
you'd thought it would be so much as just a relief.  Anne, the reporter for The Witness, has tracked down an area man who was the last person to have seen the
ivory-billed woodpecker and it turns out to be none other than Robert Vaughn!
Robert is sporting some hilarious face make-up that is supposed to look like
he's been blinded in a bird attack, but ends up looking like he got to the set
late and he had to put it on himself. He plays the Vietnam vet, Dr. Fred Brown,
and if you're wondering how a Vietnam vet who killed four people and lots of
birds managed to both become a doctor and be paroled in less than thirty years,
it's because his family was never found! Except for the body in a truck the
kids find about a hundred yards from his old house (he lives in a different
place now - too many bad memories and feathers everywhere).
Brown gives them some information he has as to where to find that woodpecker
and we're off again, deeper into the bayou where we run into that body. Despite
the fact that the body is so rotted it must have been there for, I don't know,
about thirty years, everyone gets scared and runs away before they're next! For
some reason this doesn't involve going back they way they came, but instead
just moving aimlessly through the bayou until they come upon an old abandoned
house that just happens to be the one Fred Brown lived in when he killed all
those people. In an expected, yet still stupid, twist, Steve turns out to be
the son that Brown spared. Naturally, Steve has flashbacks in the house and
announces that the house has weird vibrations (maybe it's that ivory-billed
woodpecker you got in your pants, buddy), so naturally everyone decides to
spend the night and go looking for the van in the morning. Slasher mode then
commences. Other than Robert Vaughn's brief presence, the movie isn't notable for much,
but it's always good to see returning Vietnam vets portrayed in Italian films
as nutters (see also John Saxon in Cannibal Apocalypse). It's probably just Italy's lingering anger that we whupped up on them in
WWII. A few gory scenes wasted on people you were rooting to see die as well as
a generally ugly, poorly lit and photographed movie combine with a cast that's
perpetually sweaty (I'm sure it's really humid down in the bayou, but it's
still gross) and generally ill-suited to careers in film, make this one highly
skippable. There is an interview with Robert Vaughn on the DVD which is interesting
because after saying a few things about this movie, he starts remembering his
experience on the Teenage Caveman set with director Roger Corman and recounts how he was always getting injured
on that movie. He also talks about what gentlemen Christopher Lee and Boris
Karloff were to work with on various projects as well as mentioning working on Battle Beyond The Stars. Obviously, like those of us who watched this movie, Robert would much rather
remember anything else but working on it.
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