A Zombie Movie Made On the Cheep

Steve Porter (Timothy Watts) leads up a team of enthusiastic ornithology students who venture into rural Louisiana in search of a rarely-sighted woodpecker. Along the way, they stop in to meet Dr. Fredrick Brown (Robert Vaughn), one of only a few people to have ever sighted the bird. Brown was blinded in a terrible bird attack decades ago, and his academic endeavours are spent analysing birdsong – but he does have tucked away a map of the area where he saw the bird, and the team head out in that direction to see if it’s still in that habitat.

Dr. Brown, however, didn’t tell Steve and his pals everything. Before Brown was a blinded academic, he was a sighted soldier who returned home from a tour of duty in Vietnam only to find his wife in bed with another man. In a rage, he went on a killing spree, sparing only his baby son, and his rampage was only interrupted when he was attacked by the large number of captive birds he kept out on the veranda of his house. That house now stands abandoned, deep in the Louisiana wilderness – square in the middle of the region the map leads to. When Steve and the gang seek shelter there, dark forces evoked by Brown’s traumatic rampage stir…

Say what you like about Joe D’Amato – and trust me, there’s an awful lot you can say – but one of his better qualities was a willingness to cultivate younger talents. After Michele Soavi cut his teeth on projects for others, D’Amato gave him his big break as a director, yielding the excellent StageFright. And on that production a young, enthusiastic up-and-comer named Claudio Lattanzi, who had previously helped Soavi on a retrospective documentary about Dario Argento’s career, served as Soavi’s assistant director.

Soavi, in fact, was D’Amato’s first pick to direct his 1988 release Killing Birds – but then Dario Argento offered Soavi the chance to direct The Church, which he jumped at. D’Amato then turned to Lattanzi, offering him the director’s spot for this project… kind of. As it turns out, there’s a lot of question marks over the extent to which Lattanzi can actually be said to have directed Killing Birds; more or less everyone involved in the production, including Lattanzi himself, agrees that D’Amato himself did some of the directing but left himself uncredited, and some argue that Lattanzi was basically there to tag along and put his name on the thing and D’Amato did the entire thing himself.