Genre Comedy

The Last Samoan Zombie (2023)

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

★ — The Last Samoan Zombie (2023)

American Samoa has produced precious little in the way of homegrown cinema, which makes any feature (or near-feature) from the territory something of a curiosity by default. The island chain sits outside the main currents of Pacific filmmaking, and the handful of productions that have emerged tend to reflect the particular social textures of Samoan and wider Polynesian communities rather than chasing mainstream genre conventions. It is worth mentioning, for context, that American Samoa's most notable brush with international screen attention came through sport rather than horror, as anyone who caught Next Goal Wins will know. The Last Samoan Zombie, released in 2023 and running to just 33 minutes, arrives from a rather different direction: it grows out of social media culture, trading on the existing online followings of its performers rather than on any conventional film industry infrastructure.

The film was produced by Polyverse Social Media Films and directed by Jermaine Leef, a name not widely associated with a prior body of theatrical or festival work. The premise places a group of social media personalities, including the collective known as Uce Gang, at the centre of a Samoan zombie apocalypse scenario, a horror-comedy hybrid that is clearly working in the tradition of low-budget genre parody rather than straight-faced fright. The horror-comedy blend has a long and occasionally glorious history, from full-scale studio productions down to micro-budget efforts made for and distributed among tight communities, and the zombie strand of it in particular has proved resilient across decades. For a sense of how the horror end of that register can be handled with care and imagination, even on limited resources, it is worth glancing at You Won't Be Alone, though that film occupies a very different register entirely. The principal cast here, Tracey Ogden, Gemma McIver, Mark R Black, Daniel Ogden, and Uce Gang, are drawn more from the world of online content creation than from any stage or screen background, and the film appears to lean into that rather than work against it. Whether that gamble pays off is precisely the question.

Films made at this sort of intersection, social media fame meeting genre pastiche on a shoestring, occupy an interesting and sometimes difficult space. The comedy requirements alone are demanding: broad enough to land with a general audience, specific enough to reward the existing fans. Getting the tone right in a horror-comedy is tricky even for experienced filmmakers and writers, as plenty of polished but unremarkable genre efforts demonstrate each year. The fact that The Last Samoan Zombie keeps things to half an hour suggests either a disciplined awareness of its own means, or simply the practical reality of what was achievable. Either way, it pitches itself as a breezy, knockabout lark, something in the same casual spirit as other comedy shorts that wear their low budgets openly, though whether it earns that goodwill is another matter. For a sense of how comedy can work at the margins of conventional film production, I have looked at a range of films on this site, including another comedy that approached the genre from an unexpected cultural angle.

I went into this thinking: “Okay, it’s dumb, but maybe it’ll be fun.” It wasn’t even that. Look, I follow some of these influencers and I get the joke, they’re not actors, they’re personalities. But this isn’t a film. It’s just a 30-minute vlog where someone decided to throw in some fake blood, a poor zombie, and call it a day. There’s no story. No tension. No real jokes. Just a bunch of guys messing around in Samoa pretending they’re in a horror-comedy, while the editing jumps all over the place and the dialogue reads like it was written on the spot… badly. Even as a goofy, low-budget lark it doesn’t work. The jokes fall flat. The zombie attacks are laughable. And the only suspense is wondering if they ever actually intended to make a movie at all. It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good. It’s just… bad.

I had genuinely hoped this one might be a pleasant surprise, the sort of scrappy little film you recommend to people with the caveat "just go with it." There is something appealing in principle about Samoan filmmakers and online personalities having a go at a genre piece on their own terms, and I wanted that spirit to carry it through. It just does not. The rough edges that can make a low-budget comedy charming here feel less like character and more like the absence of a plan. It is a shame, because the setting is genuinely unusual and there is no reason, in principle, why a 33-minute zombie comedy from American Samoa could not be a minor delight. If you are after something from the 2020s that actually makes good on an interesting cultural angle and an off-centre premise, I would point you instead towards Tiger Stripes, which has real ambition behind it. The Last Samoan Zombie, by contrast, is one to leave alone.

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

View on Letterboxd →

Related on Movies With Macca