Zombie 5: Killing Birds (1987)
Holy crap: apparently bad Italian horror directors can travel through time! I learned this today while I was trying to keep my brain from dying while watching Zombie 5: Killing Birds. Zombie (or Zombie 2) was put out in 1979. In 1988 some degenerates decided to release both Zombie 3 AND Zombie 4, only to then travel back in time to 1987 to release Zombie 5. If that sounds confusing, do not walk, RUN away from Zombie 5 as fast as you can, because it just goes downhill from there. And you know what, even if that *does* make sense, still run the fuck away from this travesty of filmmaking. Fun fact: I’d have given this movie zero stars if our ranking system went down that far.
In the movie, this is the last half-way interesting thing you will see for quite some time.
Premise: 1/5
You’ll have to forgive me if I forego my usual overly-long but hopefully amusing synopsis of the movie, because the sooner I can close the book on having seen it the happier I will be. I can’t even make this sound entertaining, and it hurts to try. Basically, some Vietnam vet guy comes home, finds his wife cheating on him with another man, kills them both plus some other folks, then gets his eyes plucked out by a hawk. Some years later, a group of absolutely pathetic characters that make you want to beat their asses get a research project approved where they get to go traipsing around Louisiana to try and find the ivory-billed woodpecker. They’re stupid, lose their “camper” (which is really just a van, but apparently no one can tell the bloody difference) and have to end up staying the night at a spooky old house in the middle of the woods. The spooky ol’ mansion, by the way, is really just about a hundred yards away from their “camper,” but horror movie logic necessitates that the characters be too utterly moronic to look for it. Then this movie tries to rip off Lucio Fulci’s infinitely-superior-in-every-way The Beyond by having weird supernatural stuff happen, then most of the characters die after annoying the fuck out of you for what seems like an eternity. Birds don’t really kill anyone, and there’s only two zombies that you don’t even SEE until about an hour and fifteen minutes into the hour and a half long movie. There’s a “twist” as to who the main character Steve’s daddy is that gets revealed at the end, but you’d have to be dead or watching another movie entirely (in which case, good for you! you made the right choice!) to not see coming from a mile away. Anyways, this movie sucks and I hate it. Next topic.
At least we know we're back in Italy.
Cast: .5/5
That’s right, a .5—I’ve seen some miserable shit acting in my time, but this really takes the cake. Every time any of the characters opens their friggin’ mouth I groan, because I know the next thing I will hear is going to be something outrageously retarded, unintelligible and incoherent mumbling, or something that will make me want to hit them very very hard. EVERY time, and that’s no exaggeration. The one exception is Robert Vaughan (he musta been free the week this movie was made or something), who still sucks, but I’ll chalk it up to director Joe D’Amato, who should probably just stick to directing porn, since that’s about as “competent” as he gets. It’s probably shitty porn, too—but I digress. Yeah, the cast universally sucks here. Moving on.
Internet pr0n in the '80s just wasn't as good, was it?
Technical: 1/5
I really, really dislike this movie. The special effects are as bad as those in Zombie 4, but they only get used in a very small fraction of this movie. Most of Zombie 5 is, I guess, “buildup,” only it’s sucky buildup and the only dread it fills me with is the dread of this movie going on and on forever. There’s one surprisingly cool scene where the fucktard gang is sitting in the main room of spooky ol’ mansion, and one of the characters asks “Where’s Steve?” Then it cuts to a scene of Steve in another part of the house exploring, when he starts having some frightening visions and runs like hell through the house to escape them, but can’t find any of his gang even though he runs through that main room. At first I thought I’d either mistaken the main room the rest of them were in for a similar-looking room that Steve runs through, but the movie set me straight on that point a moment later, when, after Steve passes through it, he doubles back and finds, to his surprise, the whole gang looking at him like he’s crazy for being so worked up for no apparent reason. Very cool scene, too bad it’s the only one with any merit in the whole movie.
The zombies (really more like angry revenants—they’re not interested in eating anyone, just killing) have pretty cool face makeup or masks, but the rest of their costume just looks like a mossy tarp was thrown over them. Don’t get me started on the death scenes that get dragged out by the way they’re pretty much showing you the same exact shot about three times to make it seem like an extended gore scene. Or the “spooky” blacking out of a photograph one of the characters find which is edited with all the finesse of a Gallagher Sledge-O-Matic bit. Or the terror the movie tries to create around a—horror of horrors!—leaky faucet. I could rant and rave about how bad everything in this movie is, but I think I’ve gotten my point across by now.
"Ohhh yeah!"
Popcorn Factor: .5/5
Yeah, that’s another .5 for ya. What’s fun about this movie? Absolutely nothing. It’s boredom incarnate with aspirations of building atmosphere. One or two inspired scenes do nothing to alleviate the tedium and lameness of everything else you’re subjected to. You’ve seen all the kills but one (involving one guy being killed when his hanging compass gets caught in a generator while his idiot friend stares slackjawed at this for two minutes or more—you know, instead of trying to help the other guy get the neck loop off) done better anywhere else, the backstory is so brief and meaningless (except for the “twist” I mentioned above) as to practically exist in another movie altogether, and just overall you will hate the time you waste on this movie. “Killing Birds” takes wing less as a majestic eagle, and more as a dead parrot rotting in the sun for three months. Actually, that sounds a bit too colorful to be this movie. I’m thinking more along the lines of “tofurkey.” Deep, deep hurting.