Genre Comedy

The Last Samoan Zombie (2023)

Item: The Last Samoan Zombie
Rating: 1.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★ — The Last Samoan Zombie (2023)

There's a particular kind of disappointment that comes not from expecting greatness and getting mediocrity, but from expecting mediocrity and getting something even less than that. Going into The Last Samoan Zombie, I genuinely thought: okay, it's dumb, but maybe it'll be fun. Low bar. Easily cleared. Except it wasn't. Not even close.

I follow some of the influencer crowd involved in this, and I understand what they are. They're personalities, not actors. That's fine. Plenty of entertaining things have been built on charm and charisma rather than formal craft. But there's a minimum threshold, and this doesn't clear it. What we've got here is essentially a 30-minute vlog where someone decided to throw in some fake blood, point a camera at a bloke in zombie makeup, and then submit the result to a film database with a straight face.

The problems are everywhere and they start from the ground up. There's no story to speak of. No structure. No tension, comic or otherwise. The editing jumps around like it was assembled in a rush by someone who'd never watched a film before, let alone made one. The dialogue sounds like it was written on the spot, and not in a freewheeling, improvisational way. In a bad way. In a "nobody thought about this for more than thirty seconds" way. You sit there watching a bunch of lads messing about in Samoa, and you keep waiting for the film to arrive, for something to kick in, for a joke to actually land. It doesn't happen.

The zombie attacks, when they come, are laughable, and not in the way horror-comedies aim for. There's no craft to the gags. No setup, no payoff. Just chaos and fake blood and people gurning at the camera. I kept thinking about what a genuinely good low-budget genre film looks like, the kind that knows its limitations and works creatively within them. Tiger Stripes managed something genuinely unsettling and inventive on what I'd imagine was a fraction of any Hollywood budget. The difference is intention. That film wanted to be something. This one, I'm honestly not sure what it wanted to be.

The most generous reading I can offer is that it's a lark, a bit of fun between mates who happened to have a camera and a free afternoon in Samoa. Fine. But larks don't get submitted as films. And even judged as a lark, it fails, because larks are supposed to be fun to watch, not just fun to make. The only suspense I felt throughout was a creeping existential question: did anyone, at any point, actually intend to make a movie here? Or did it just sort of happen, the way a hangover happens?

I've got plenty of time for so-bad-it's-good. That's a legitimate category. There's genuine pleasure in watching something swing wildly and miss, in tracing the ambition behind the failure. But so-bad-it's-good requires a certain energy, a commitment to the bit, a sense that someone cared deeply enough to get it gloriously wrong. This doesn't have that. It's just bad. Flat, shapeless, forgettable bad. The kind of bad that doesn't even give you anything to talk about afterwards.

One star, and I'm not sure it's earned it.

Rating: ★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2025-05-20

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