Oh boy… One I’ve long been leaving on the back burner finally flies into the forefront…

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema review. This time around, I check back in with the goofy Zombie series, and leave it to the Italians to be weird. Well… sort of. The weirdness of this is not entirely their fault. It’s partially, for once, our fault. Stupid Americans.

Allow me to explain. If you’re reading this blog, you already basically know that Zombi is the Italian title for George Romero’s masterpiece Dawn of the Dead (dollars-for-donuts my pick as the best horror film ever made). Not willing to let any time pass them by without taking full advantage of a possible ripoff of that greatness that is Dawn, in comes Lucio Fulci and his Zombi 2 (aka Zombie here in America, as it is not a sequel here but a different movie altogether). Nine whole years later, Fulci would start in on another entry that doesn’t seem to have anything related to either Dawn or Zombie, but would continue the whole zombie apocalypse thing and also have a flying head that comes out of a fridge to bite someone. That would be 1988’s Zombi 3. Zombie 3 is a bit of a mess, but it’s also got some fun with the inconsistency of how the zombies operate. One thing that is unfair about Zombie 3 is that Fulci should not get full credit as he got very ill and the film had to basically be mostly shot by Claudio Fragasso (of Troll 2 fame) and Bruno Mattei (of Shocking Dark fame).

Alas… Zombi 3 is the final chapter of a VERY loose trilogy for the Italians.

But we couldn’t leave such things alone here in America. Those movies, particularly Zombi 2/Zombie have a pretty decent following in terms of cable and video store business. So, we Americans decided to slap the title on a couple other movies from Italy. Most notably, we found a movie called After Death and turned it into Zombie 4: After Death. I actually kind of think that Zombie 4 is a little better of a movie than Zombie 3. It’s still Fragasso, but there’s a little more consistency in things in the fourth film. It’s not as fun as the third film, and I’d prefer to watch the third movie almost every time over the fourth, but there are a few qualities to it. But we’re on shaky ground for sure.

And, so, here we are, at this week’s feature, Zombie 5: Killing Birds. Again, this is a movie that the title was simply slapped on. There was already a movie called Killing Birds, but I guess someone over here thought it would only sell well if it had that Zombie title on it. What’s kind of hilarious, and literally something that shut my brain all the way down for, like, 30 minutes (no shit, I was brain dead for a full half hour and crossed over – seriously, I saw some shit that’s like Event Horizon until everything turned back on and revitalized me), was that After Death is a 1989 movie. Therefore, Zombie 4 has the date of 1989. Killing Birds has a date of 1988. Therefore, Zombie 5 says 1988… the same year as Zombie 3. A year before Zombie 4. I think I just heard eyeless Sam Neill tell me to lick his eyeless eye sockets.

Sigh… Anyway. Yeah, so the Zombie series is all fucked up.

Killing Birds was co-directed by Joe D’Amato (director of Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals) and Claudio Lattanzi. Lattanzi was someone who grew up always wanting to make films and eventually became friends with Dario Argento and Michele Soavi. That friendship landed Lattanzi assistant work on Soavi’s Stage Fright and a documentary about Argento’s horror films. D’Amato produced Stage Fright so he asked Lattanzi if he wanted a crack at this bird movie. But here’s the thing… The co-directing credit is a little fuzzy. A lot of crew members claim it really was D’Amato that directed it. D’Amato cops to this saying he wanted to do the effects scenes and let Lattanzi do the dialog bits (known in the horror industry as “the boring bits”). D’Amato allowed Lattanzi to get that credit as co-director.

Alright so here we go… The movie starts and, much to my surprise, we have Robert Vaughn in this cast. Now, Vaughn passed away in 2016, but not before racking up all kinds of recognizable roles. He was nominated for an Oscar in his supporting role in The Young Philadelphians which starred Paul Newman, but also had a bit part for Adam West. He appeared in the terrifying 1980 American and Japanese co-production Virus. His very first movie, despite being uncredited, was The Ten Commandments. In his later years, you probably recognize him as a spokesperson for law offices. Here in the Central Indiana area, it was for Keller and Keller because they used the slogan that Vaughn always said, “Tell them you mean business!”

Of course, to people like me in the Gen X age group, we know him best as villain Ross Webster in Superman III. In that, he hired Richard Pryor to devise a machine to kill Superman. I actually kind of like him in the role. He’s very comic booky in his arch demeanor. However, the movie promised us all that “This time… Will be the best time!” It… was not. That movie kind of sucks. Even as a kid I knew it kind of sucked. But it did feature that scene in which Vaughn’s character’s sister gets turned into a robot and that stuck with a lot of little kids for a long time.

Anyway, this movie begins as we see a man returning home to Louisiana from the Vietnam War. Now, there is something wrong here at home. I’d say that his wife boinking another dude is kind of bad. Sure. The fact that he then decides, because, you know, Vietnam vets are crazy (or so the movies and some real life after 2016 has always taught me), to kill everyone but his son is pretty bad too. However… There are a LOT of birds at his home on the porch. That’s… That’s a lot of birds. You’re spending a lot of money on newspapers for those birds’ shit. There are hawks and cockatiels and finches and song birds and… It’s a lot of birds!

Anyway, as I alluded to, he comes home to see his wife, and instead finds her sleeping happily with another man. He slices the man’s throat and leaves him for his wife to wake up to. Meanwhile, elsewhere, his parents and, I guess, his baby son are coming home from church. He stalks his wife as she tries to escape to get help for her murdered lover. He eventually corners her on the bird porch and he slits her throat as well. Just then, his parents come home with his baby. They are surprised to see him and try to escape, but he kills them. He spares his son, which… Question. Did he get weekends home from the Vietnam War? That’s a pretty small baby in this movie and I’d have to assume he’s been gone for a bit. Isn’t there a danger that might be the other dude’s baby?

Anyway, as he cleans up his mess, an eagle attacks him and plucks one eye out and blinds the man in another.

A couple decades pass and we meet some college kids. Our main college student, Steve, and his buddy, Paul, discover they have a pretty sweet grant deal to go looking for an elusive, nearly extinct, species of woodpecker. The woodpecker hasn’t been seen since the 60s and will be officially labeled as extinct by the early 90s. Steve’s crew is going to be joined by Anne, a journalist for the school paper. At first, Steve doesn’t want her to go, as they seemingly have history, but Anne is actually quite useful since she’s tracked down the last few people who reportedly seen the bird.

This movie’s attitude is kind of hilarious. The opening was a slasher. Now we’re at a college and it’s like a TV show. It’s almost sitcom-like as you have the tenacious Anne worming her way into Steve’s good graces. Paul will not go on the expedition without Mary, his “photography assistant” which I have to assume is code for fuck buddy. Another friend of Steve’s, Rob, has programmed an animation of two stick figures fucking. This is all set to funny soft jazz as if to show how great and happy everything is at the ol’ college campus.

I should also mention it looks like a shot-on-video production (it isn’t, but still) and acting that is, somehow, even more sophomoric than the production.

Alright, so we have Steve, Jennifer (who I think is maybe his current girlfriend? I mean they were walking the halls at one point like they were a couple), Paul, Mary, Rob, and Anne. The seventh and final member of their team is a cop named Brian. You see, they rent a van for the expedition and the state sends Brian along to make sure all comes back the good shape and no one gets harmed on the expedition. With that, they are off on their grand adventure!

The team is not too pleased about Anne’s involvement. It isn’t just Steve. The whole point of the expedition is to write their findings and publish their findings to a reputable science magazine. If Anne publishes the expedition first to the school paper, then why would the other magazine feel any need to get the exclusive report and findings on the woodpecker? Steve sticks up for her by saying that 1) she did find the people who last saw the species and 2) she isn’t reporting on the finding of the bird, she’s reporting on the team and telling their story.

The only person who was on Anne’s list who lives in Louisiana is Fred Brown, played by Robert Vaughn. Now… sigh. Okay, so we are specifically told two things about this Brown fella. The first is he is a Vietnam vet. The second thing was that he is blind. We are even told that the blinding happened AFTER Vietnam and “sometime later”. The guy at the beginning of the movie was specifically not shown until he said goodbye to his son and his eyes were all bandaged up. When Vaughn is shown looking like below, well, it’s hard to believe he wasn’t a four-time murderer.

That is pretty awesome makeup though. It’s like this guy is all, “I don’t fucking care. I ain’t wearing those stupid blind guy sunglasses!” This guy is doing his thing his way. He makes no bones about liking that he frightened Anne and Steve when he snuck on them after they entered his house. He eventually starts talking to the two students while the rest of the crew is hanging out outside. To get a “look” at Steve, he feels around his face. I’m sure we’re going to find out that Steve is the baby.

Anyway, Fred has recordings of the calls of various birds. He doesn’t have too much information other than a recording of a pretty pissed off sounding bird who only makes that call in a very specific climate conditions. There is one item Fred can give Steven – a folder with his personal findings and map and such. Anne wanted to find out more about Fred whose family “mysteriously disappeared” shortly after he got home from the war, but she’s ushered along with the rest of the team to continue on their expedition.

The team gets to work on looking for that woodpecker. It starts off all innocent and happy as Brian serenades everyone with his harmonica. It also seems as though Steve and Anne are getting a little flirty with each other too. As they make their way though a hazy forest, they find an old truck that is seemingly abandoned. They investigate and find a rotting corpse inside. Brian tells them to keep on moving or they’ll end up the same way. Good cop work there, Brian.

They find a house to hole up in. It’s a long abandoned house based on its condition. They go inside to look around, and you’d think this might be a pretty good place for zombie 5 or killing birds to be hanging out and waiting to kill these guys, right? One thing’s for sure, everyone is splitting up and looking over everything. Jennifer finds the bird porch from the beginning of the movie. Paul and Mary find the fuck bed that Robert Vaughn killed his wife’s lover in. Brian and Rob find a secret hatch that goes into a basement crawlspace where they see a generator they could power up for some electricity.

As Steve pokes around, he’s being watched by hawks. He also finds a stairway to an attic loft. I will give this movie one thing… It’s really bad. I feel like no one got overdubbed as they should have for being an Italian movie. Anne is VERY clearly German. Other people aren’t really giving their everything as they speak their lines. I have to assume the full post-production was not done to dub everyone like a normal Italian movie.

But for real… I will give this movie props for a couple things. One, this abandoned house is dressed well and does have some pretty creepy vibes even as our characters are investigating this place in the broad daylight. It helps the music is, for once, quite appropriate in giving this setting a real creepy atmosphere and a place that’s going to likely be important later. The other thing is that this movie feels somewhat original. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to shoehorn in any ideas about a zombie virus or whatever. It’s got a pacing that is attempting to build a bit of suspense as long as you can look past the shoddy looks and the weird acting and the other scenes that had really bad music.

Something else really interesting starts happening at about the halfway mark of this movie. The rest of the team settle in at this house and set up shop. Jennifer asks where Steve is but Anne doesn’t know. Steve also can’t find the rest of the team. He starts seeing evidence of the murders that took place back in the mid 60s. He eventually finds the rest of the team after seeing several nightmare images. Once reunited, Brian says it’s going to be dark soon and maybe they should stay there for the night. Steve thinks that’s not a great idea, but no one else wants to leave. Brian and Rob get the generator up and running to give them power for the night.

People begin turning in for the night. As Jennifer walks around outside, a man in army boots comes into the room Mary and Paul are sleeping in and slits her throat just as was seen to Fred’s wife’s lover at the start of the movie. However, it’s just a nightmare. She wakes up and hears what seems like footsteps, but Paul won’t wake up to investigate so she goes to the bathroom to check things out. To get some fresh air, she opens the window and sees Jennifer go into the bird porch (or, I guess, aviary if you want to be fancy about naming things). She sees that Jennifer is startled by something and knocks a hanging light that obscures much more in terms of what she can see. We learn that what Jennifer sees is a cobweb covered zombie shambling toward her.

She barricades herself in a room off the aviary and hides out, only for her to be attacked by another zombie hiding in the room she’s hiding in. That zombie bashes her face into the wall over and over until it caves her head and face in. Mary wakes Paul up and says that she saw Jennifer go into the porch but she never came back out. Both Mary and Steve are having a hard time sleeping and get strange feelings from the house.

They collectively check out the porch but don’t find her. Steve says they should search the house for her. Although, I’m not sure that will take too long. I mean, Anne says maybe Jennifer went for a walk. Wouldn’t it make more sense to go outside and look for her? Anyway, Brian catches on fire. How? Why? I dunno. It had something to do with the generator leaking. I like that the cop, and, therefore, the guy with the gun, is killed, not by zombies, but by being lit on fucking fire.

I might add, we’re less than 30 minutes to the end of this movie and we’ve seen two zombies and exactly zero birds that are in the killing business.

Alright, so, after discovering Jennifer’s body, everyone decides to make a run for the van, but, uh oh… Brian had the keys and, well… He’s still on fire somewhere. Mary and Paul are the first to get to the van, but once the rest of the gang get there, Rob has to try to hotwire the thing started. Through the fog, a zombie comes shambling toward the van. Mary tries to scoot to the back of the van to cower from the approaching zombie, but another busts out the window and grabs her.

Rob gets the van rolling which only means that as the van rolls forward, and the zombie holds Mary’s head, her throat tears open and kills her. The other zombie busts open the driver’s side window and tries to get at Rob. They have to abandon the van and go back to the house.

The generator shuts off so Rob and Paul go to check it out. Meanwhile, Anne and Steve try to barricade the doors. Rob and Paul are able to get the generator back on. When the door in the basement suddenly flies open, the guys are startled which causes the compass around Rob’s neck to get caught in the gears of the generator and he’s slowly pulled into it while Paul does pretty much nothing but watch in shock and fear.

Good news for Paul, though. When you have zombies running around, you can scapegoat them for the death of Rob! In the main room of the house, Rob’s computer gets a message from Fred saying, “Welcome Home, Steve.” Just to emphasize it, it begins flashing. So, yeah, Fred is Steve’s dad and he was the lone survivor of all the murder 20+ years ago. Like, no duh. This movie is about as subtle in those things as a punch to the fucking dick.

It is funny because this movie isn’t really that bad in terms of pacing itself with creep factor. Sure, maybe there’s no sense in why there are zombies in this movie, it keeps it on the level of something like a Night of the Living Dead where the explanation is not quite as important as that atmosphere and mood of the chills.

Anyway, a zombie busts through a wall to grab Anne, but Paul and Steve save her from it. They eventually go to the attic where the zombie follows, but before long, the zombie stops banging on the attic door. Instead it attacks from the roof and grabs Paul and tears his throat open. It’s actually a similar death to his girlfriend, Mary. So, kudos to that I guess.

Soon, the zombies stop attacking and daylight comes. Steve and Anne leave the attic where they are then approached by Fred who tells them they are now out of danger. The zombies really want Fred. He says the zombies are powered by fear. He’s never given them the power they need because his blindness prevents him from being afraid. He says that Steve and Anne should leave and he’ll stay behind to allow them to have the fear they are seeking. They run outside and look on in horror as birds gather and they hear Fred screaming inside the house.

Generally, this isn’t really that bad of a movie. There are issues, though. Some of the cheesiness of the music and the college kids being introduced will be the make or break moment for viewers. That said, another issue comes in the form of the title Killing Birds. There are birds. There are ornithologists. There’s that bird porch. Two birds are killed in the form of Jennifer and Mary. But the title makes you think the birds are the killers or the ones who make the zombies. There are zombies… sort of. It’s more accurate to say that the zombies were really more bad juju of the place given necrotic flesh to seek revenge.

There are a few other problems that comes from a late 80s Italian horror movie perspective. As I detailed before, the movie doesn’t exactly look very good, the acting is bad, and some of the music choices are mind-boggling. That all said, again, this really isn’t that bad of a movie. It’s definitely worth the roughly 90-minute runtime to check out at least once. The one main positive it does have is that it’s suspenseful to the point that it does start to travel toward Night of the Living Dead territory. All-in-all, we can have a little fun with this sort-of-fifth entry in the Zombie series, but we could have also done a whole lot worse.

So, let’s wrap things up with this week and look toward next week! Since we’re still doing the sequel thing, let’s get back into the lady thing with Vice Academy 3. That entry is a bit of a transitory entry because it’s the first without Linnea Quigley. It’s the first to feature her character’s sister, Candy, played by Elizabeth Kaitan. And it’s the last that will have Ginger Lynn Allen as the headlining star. Buuuut… All that’s fine and dandy, but is it any good? Come back next time and allow me to arrest a little bit of your attention to find out!