Vinegar Syndrome delves into Italian horror with a Blu-ray of the eighties genre mashup KILLING BIRDS.

When Loyola University ornithology student Steven Porter (Timothy W. Watts) gets a grant to search for the rarely-seen ivory-billed woodpecker before it is declared extinct, he assembles a team including shrill girlfriend Jennifer (Lin Gathright, TOP MODEL), photographer Paul (James Villemaire, PRIVATE PARTS) and his girlfriend/assistant Mary (Leslie Cumming, WITCHERY), and computer perv Rob (James Sutterfield, TOP MODEL) along with wise ass camper driver Brian (Sal Maggiore Jr., ANY TIME, ANY PLAY). Inviting herself along is school newspaper reporter and Paul's ex-girlfriend Anne (Lara Wendel, TENEBRAE) who traces the whereabouts of Frederick Brown (Robert Vaughn, BURIED ALIVE) – one of the last people to see the ivory-billed woodpecker and now a "blind birdwatcher" – but she is even more interested in the mysterious disappearance of his family upon his return from Vietnam. The morose Brown is strangely interested in Steve and reluctantly provides him with a map of the area where he last saw the bird more than twenty years before. Getting lost in a tract of seldom-explored Louisiana swampland on the way back to the camper, they stumble upon a decaying corpse and shelter in an abandoned Acadian plantation house as night falls. Although each member of the expedition discovers strange things exploring the house, it is Steve who experiences the house's bad vibes in the form of vivid hallucinations. When the sun goes down, the murderous undead rise from the swamp to prey on the unsuspecting.

Originally filmed as RAPTORS, KILLING BIRDS has been known in some territories as ZOMBIE 5 but it actually has more in common with production company Filmirage's LA CASA series of GHOSTHOUSE, WITCHERY, and BEYOND DARKNESS which was initiated to cash in on the success of THE EVIL DEAD which became LA CASA in Italy. The zombie wreak havoc but are rather incidental to the haunted house aspect of the film; however, the plot as such is so heavily-muddled that we have only the prologue and a few lines from Vaughn at the end to tie together a poorly-motivated body count with so-so make-up effects work. The location is striking with producer and cinematographer Aristide Massaccesi AKA Joe D'Amato and composer Carlo Maria Cordio (BODY PUZZLE) slathering on the atmosphere, but a tighter script might have made better use of the resources including a cast of mostly unknowns apart from Vaughn and Wendel. It has been a point of contention just how much of the direction can be attributed to credited director Claudio Lattanzi who assisted Michele Soavi on STAGE FRIGHT and THE CHURCH. The film's disjointed feel does not feel like it had the heavy hand of D'Amato but he may have overseen post-production with his usual team. Lattanzi's subsequent credits include a documentary on Soavi and more recently the horror film EVERYBODY'S END.

Unreleased in the United States, KILLING BIRDS was available as a bootleg from a Japanese-subtitled cassette while the first English-friendly DVD release from Germany was a botched attempt to graft video inserts of the gore scenes onto a cut Italian TV master. While an uncut, anamorphic DVD appeared stateside from Shriek Show, the Italian TV cut persisted overseas including the transfer of CineKult's Italian special edition DVD (a French DVD featured a transfer of the French version which had its own cuts). Fortunately, Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray is sourced from a new 2K scan of the original 35mm camera negative and is fully uncut. The diffused exteriors fare better in high definition and the enhanced sense of detail aides the depiction of the atmosphere of decay and an early bird-assisted eye gouging holds up while some of the other effects look worse than before. Although the film was mixed in Ultra Stereo, all releases before have been in mono and that is the case with this release's English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 and Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks which reveal with added clarity some major faults in the original mix. In some scenes like the early university scenes, it is apparent that the mixers did not make use of room tone or did not have it as background noise heard behind the sync-sound dialogue drops out completely between lines when added sound effects are heard. Scenes with music underscore call less attention to this, and it is less noticeable during the later scenes since the sounds of the swamp are layered under the dialogue throughout. The Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 and Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks do not have this problem since all of the dialogue is post-dubbed in studio. The disc only features optional English SDH subtitles for the English track.

The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by film historian Samm Deighan in which she discusses the slump in Italian filmmaking during the period and the how the cash-in filmmaking trends of the genre earlier in the decade gave way to more genre mashups like this film's combination of slasher and ghost story tropes. She provides some background on Lattanzi's original treatment for the film about a rock group recording an album in a haunted house with Nazi zombies, and is of the opinion that D'Amato did likely direct most of the film with Lattanzi given some "experience on the set" in the manner of D'Amato giving young filmmakers a start at a difficult time in the industry. In "Talons" (49:10), a new interview with Lattanzi, the director asserts that he was a hundred percent the director on the set while conceding that he was more of an "observer" and occasional contributor to the Daniele Stroppa (THE WAX MASK) screenplay that departed significantly from his treatment "The Obsolete Gate". He does note that he penned the treatment inspired by THE EVIL DEAD and know that the film was heavily influential on the LA CASA series – he also notes that he worked with Stroppa on the screenplay for WITCHERY and wanted to direct it but was not credited for his work on it (Stroppa himself is credited as "Daniel Davis") – and also confirms that he was involved in the film's post-production. He notes that he worked as an assistant director on more Filmirage projects than on which he is credited and that the studio gave opportunities to young filmmakers but also admits that he has a love/hate relationship with it and D'Amato.