Zombie 5: Killing Birds

“Zombie 5: Killing Birds” is a film so uncertain of what path to take that it ends up stopping altogether, forcing us to endure ninety minutes of absolutely nothing. Beyond the fact that the screenplay went missing before they started shooting (or maybe it never existed at all), the plot suffers from a frightening lack of energy and momentum, and what few events actually do occur seem entirely random and impromptu. As for those “killing birds”, that’s a bit of false advertising, given that the various killings are the work of a cuckolded ex-soldier, a pair of spiderweb-covered walking dead, and a persnickety generator.

The actors’ performances match the quality of the plot: they stare off into the void, wander around disoriented, and generally abstain from acting at all. Even the soundtrack doesn’t mess around when it comes to incoherence – after a first half hour dominated by intrusive, soap opera-esque theme music, the rest of the film sounds like a Rocky Balboa training montage.

But it’s in the dialogue department that the film reveals its most ludicrous side, offering a series of little gems from which it’s impossible to ignore the blind man’s jaw-dropping statement regarding the zombielike creatures: “It was fear that killed your friends. They [the monsters] hold no power on me. How can you be afraid when you live in eternal darkness?“. So, basically he’s saying that blindness makes fear impossible (protecting him from the zombies, incidentally), a concept worthy of a Z movie, which is exactly what we have here.