Zombie 5: Killing Birds (1987)

In the right mindset, Filmirage productions like Ghosthouse, Witchery, and Troll 2 can be a lot of fun, with a great amount of low budget cheese and outrageous horror. There were a couple titles that I thought stood out of this mold that were actually quite harrowing and long winded (in a good way) like Hitcher in the Dark and Door to Silence. I’ve always had a soft spot for the company, and I do aspire to see every Filmirage movie, myself, someday.

The company was founded in 1980 by Joe D’Amato, cult film favorite and director of nasty gore classics Beyond the Darkness and Antropophagus as well as most of the output from the guilty pleasure that is the Black Emanuelle series with Laura Gemser, who’s as classy as these BE films are sleazy. The company pelted out titles fairly consistently from 1980 to 1994, eventually ceasing to make films from what I’m guessing to be a kind of commercial low point in Italian cinema. There are most certainly a number of notorious cult classics among the selection which spans at least forty-five movies.

Directed by Joe D’Amato and Claudio Lattanzi, Killing Birds, or as it has become known in the US Zombie 5: Killing Birds, placing it into the infamously confusing Zombi series lineup, is a mixed bag with all of the elements that make a Filmirage horror movie a lot of fun.

It should be taken into consideration that Zombie 5: Killing Birds actually isn’t much of a zombie film nor is it much of a killer bird film, so it would probably suffice to say that it was titled poorly. Ninety-nine percent of everyone going into this will be expecting a zombie movie, but there are only a few zombies, and they’re more like ghoulish closet monsters, which don’t bite their victims, but rather they thrash them about, resulting in some pretty brutal gore. I’m not kidding. Watch Jennifer’s (Lin Gathright) death scene at around 56:30, and try to tell me this movie doesn’t have balls.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974)

I have read of the elusive cult that targets and stalks vulnerable victims while driving them to madness and suicide. They have a preferred method of friending those who’ve come into their domain, gaining the trust of the unfortunate, lonely soul who would likely not see the danger until it is too late. These sect members appear to live normal lives and are closely associated with each other in their own community, so that there’s no trouble at all once they’ve acquired a corpse for "God knows what". Once all is done, there is no memory of the unfortunate, no mourning, and no suspicion, as if the victim had never been born at all. 

Now I fear my own sanity is beginning to grow unsteady… The illusions of painful memories that appear before my eyes as though no time has passed since those tragic events…. The scary faces that follow and stare at me on my nightly walks home from work. I worry that I will soon be wiped clean from existence, in memory and in name. What will become of my body after they’ve taken me?

It all started after tasting the bitter wine that was offered to me from a so called friend, but my grip on reality really started to falter after he had me view Francesco Barilli’s THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK, a masterpiece from the golden era of Italian horror in serious need of praise and discovery. Allow me to divulge a bit more: 

The film's main character, Silvia Hacherman (Mimsy Farmer), lives alone in an archaic apartment complex and is the boss of a research and development facility. What awaits her is a spell of madness that results in resurfaced tormenting childhood memories, haunting visions of her dead mother in a black dress, and a newfound murderous instinct. A nice touch and an eerie hint of the dark mystery between Silvia and her deceased mother occurs early on when a populated cemetery she’s visiting becomes quiet and empty after viewing and laying flowers on her mother’s headstone.