cult film freak: LARA WENDEL WINGING THROUGH 'ZOMBIE 5: KILLING BIRDS'

Written by James M. Tate / 8/17/2026 / No comments / eighties , exploitation , haunted house , horror , italian , joe d'amato , lara wendel , robert vaughn , slasher , zombie

LARA WENDEL WINGING THROUGH 'ZOMBIE 5: KILLING BIRDS'

8/17/2026 | No comment

Lara Wendel in ZOMBIE 5: KILLING BIRDS Year: 1988 Rating: ***

Jeff Goldbum's JURASSIC PARK scene-stealer Ian Malcolm would have noted, had he watched ZOMBIE 5: KILLING BIRDS for over thirty-minutes, "You DO plan to have zombies in your zombie movie?"

But right at the King Kong Mark of exactly 45-minutes, a sinewy menace finally appears within one of two central-interior manors, where the usual group of young victims are unwisely camped out...

Robert Vaughn in Zombie 5: Killing Birds

In a straight-to-rental Italian-produced body-count slasher notable for three things: being scored by future TROLL 2 Casio-Snyth ace Carlo Maria Cordio, providing a cheap, eerie, foreboding and campy soundtrack; the GHOSTHOUSE followup final girl casting of Italian-cinema child-starlet turned teenager turned twenty-something scream queen Lara Wendel, here as a nosy journalist joining young scientific research students...

And the fact TV and movie legend Robert Vaughn appears, probably filmed for a day's work, spliced into a frame-story about his blind Vietnam vet character who killed his wife (and her lover) in the cold open... before getting his eyes pecked out by those KILLING BIRDS from the title...

Leslie Cumming (Leslie Cummins) in Zombie 5: Killing Birds

Random hawks and falcons, also strategically edited throughout the otherwise common FRIDAY THE 13TH style kids-being-picked-off scenario... that includes the cutest and most spooked/vulnerable ingenue in Leslie Cumming (billed as Leslie Cummins, who resembles a young Daphne Zuniga), curbed by token brainy chick Lin Gathright (picked off decades later in the fourth season of AMERICAN HORROR STORY)...

All literally trapped within a randomly violent excursion that seems almost deliberately slow-paced and tortuously-suspenseful (like a flu dream): with an illogical reason behind college students putting themselves at risk, making as little sense as why there are deadly zombies in a horror flick about deadly predator birds — or where on earth did the first four ZOMBIE films even come from?