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Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (aka Zombi 3) (1988)

Reviewed by Matt
Posted on December 28, 2005 
Filed Under Turkeys, Zombies

The boom in low budget Italian horror that occurred during the 70s and 80s didn’t exactly produce a vast number of classics, but at least in Lucio Fulci it yielded a director of considerable originality and visual flair. Fulci made his horror debut with the 1979 classic Zombie Flesh Eaters, inauspiciously released in Europe under the title Zombi 2 and posited as an unofficial sequel to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (European title: Zombi). On paper this may scream “cash-in”, but in practice, although bearing little or no relation to Romero’s film, Flesh Eaters is a pacey and stylish film, paying homage to the ‘voodoo zombie’ films of the 1930s whilst adding buckets of beautifully framed gore and dismemberment. Fulci subsequently directed another three zombie movies, developing his own rather baffling mythology around the undead. The stories verged on the incomprehensible, but Fulci’s inventive direction means they have at least some worth.

Which brings us to Zombie Flesh Eaters 2. Despite receiving sole director’s credit, Fulci apparently directed a mere 10 minutes of this film, before quitting in disgust; he subsequently disowned the film. It’s not hard to see why - this is one of the most ineptly made, painfully written and downright boring films I’ve had the misfortune of sitting through in some considerable time. It’s also completely unrelated to the original, so fans can be forgiven for feeling short-changed. Some of the film’s location work was directed by Bruno Mattei, the man behind other turkeys such as Zombie Creeping Flesh, but the bulk of the film was handled by writer Claudio Fragasso, whose direction is as shoddy as his screenplay. ZFE2 is astonishingly derivative; the science-vs-military theme is photocopied straight from Day of the Dead, and avian attack is lifted from The Birds and the movie’s final moments manage to remix the endings of the both Dawn and Night of the Living Dead. Suffice it to say, the characters are paper-thin, ranging from the utterly forgettable to the irritatingly moronic, including one soldier who attempts (with some success) to seduce the survivor of a zombie attack moments after rescuing her. The madness is all overseen by a jive-talking DJ, whose rambling patter drives home the film’s half-baked ecological message with all the subtlety of a lobotomy with an electric drill. He too succumbs to the zombie plague, and the film ends with him dedicating a record to “all the undead around the world”. No really.

The DJ’s not the only zombie to talk - these undead are not only hungry but willing to spout the most inane dialogue as well, my favourite being the guy who, have recently been zombie-fied, attacks his girlfriend with the line “I’m fine now, just a little thirsty - for your blood!!!“. This is one of several jaw-dropping moments in the film which demonstrates the complete lack of quality control on offer. Others include: the disembodied zombie head which floats out of a fridge to bite someone, the zombie birds returning to life, and the birth of a zombie baby. In all fairness, the latter reappeared in the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, which kind of shows the level Zac Snyder was working at.

These set-piece scenes aside, however, there’s isn’t really enough to push Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 into the ’so bad it’s good’ category. Even the gore, usually a reliable staple of Italian cinema, looks cheap and lacks Fulci’s inventive squish. The music is quite appalling as well, a migraine-inducing electro-funk workout that often threatens to break into Van Halen’s Jump. I’m not above enjoying really bad movies, but this is an utterly charmless film that feels too cynical for me to indulge its ineptness. It’s a mess, it looks really drab and it’s ultimately a waste of time. Zombie Flesh Eaters may have got away with cashing in, but its ’sequel’ really doesn’t make the grade.

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