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The Last Samoan Zombie (2023)

★ — The Last Samoan Zombie (2023)

Shot entirely in American Samoa on what appears to be a negligible budget, The Last Samoan Zombie is a micro-budget horror comedy produced under the Polyverse Social Media Films banner, a label built around Polynesian online content rather than conventional film production. At just 33 minutes, it sits firmly in short film territory, and its casting reflects that social media foundation, drawing on personalities with existing followings rather than trained actors. Director Jermaine Leef has no significant prior feature credits, and the project reads less as a conventional directorial debut and more as an extension of the influencer content that spawned it, transplanting a familiar zombie apocalypse premise into a specifically Samoan cultural setting.

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.

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

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