Director Lucio Fulci’s breakthrough in schlock horror was Zombi 2/Zombie/Zombie Flesh Eaters, a for-hire gig which was obviously less personal to him than gialli like Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Don’t Torture a Duckling or weirdies like The Beyond or The House By the Cemetary. But Zombi 2 become a grindhouse/video nasty favourite, for its explicit zombie gore and anything-goes looniness (it’s the one with the shark vs zombie fight and the famous eye-bursting). Appropriately, several films were released or re-released under the title Zombi 3 before Fulci signed on for this shot-in-the-Philippines follow-up.
Insofar as a sequel to a film that poses as a sequel to Dawn of the Dead (aka Zombi in Italy) can be, this Zombi 3 is ‘official’ – though Fulci didn’t stay the course and most of the film was directed uncredited by screenwriter Claudio Fragasso (whose After Death is also known as Zombi 4) and Bruno Mattei (whose Zombie Creeping Flesh was re-released as Zombi 5). The tone is pretty much that of a Mattei movie, with ridiculous gore (a hungry severed head jumping out of a fridge to bite an unwary neck, a zombie baby emerging from its mother as an adult-sized clawed hand to attack the midwife), stick-figure characters, cartoonish politics (an evil military puts out stories about helping cure civilians but guns down the infected and normal alike), a curious lack of urgency despite the ongoing zombie apocalypse plague, and truly naff 1988 costumes, hairstyles and attitudes.
The scenes with an extremely emphatic scientist and a gruff general arguing over how to cope with the crisis are excruciatingly overplayed, with hammy dubbed dialogue laid over wildly gesticulating performances. The punchline finds a disc jockey who has been spouting the Establishment line throughout the film turning to the camera while ranting about ‘the new world’ to reveal a wholly eaten-away face. An almost clever idea, riffing on the unseen radio announcer who dies at the end of Zombi 2, this is — like everything else halfway decent here — presented so overdramatically that it turns gigglesome.
‘I’ll come looking for you to feed on your intestines! I’ll be in your nightmares!’
This series works almost as a relay race – albeit one where each new runner is weaker and more misshapen than the last. First up, George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead – itself a sequel to Night of the Living Dead – was an Italian co-production, and released in Italy in a variant cut under the title Zombi. The Italian exploitation biz being only too keen to serve up spurious part twos to any hit, Lucio Fulci delivered an unrelated, but pulpily engaging Zombi 2, a grindhouse smash in the US as Zombie and a video nasty in the UK as Zombie Flesh Eaters. Then, the saga got even murkier as Fulci signed up to make a Zombi 3 in 1988 (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters 2), only to leave mid-production, whereupon Claudio Fragasso (who scripted it with Rossella Druidi) and Bruno Mattei stepped in to finish a piece of work which had more in common with Mattei’s Inferno dei morti viventi (aka Zombie Creeping Flesh, Night of the Zombies and the usual half-dozen other titles). Back to back with that Zombi 3, Fragasso (mildly infamous for Troll 2) made his own spurious sequel to the Fulci/Mattei/Fragasso spurious sequel to the Fulci spurious sequel to the legitimate Romero sequel to Night of the Living Dead. This is it.
It opens twenty years in the past, though none of the characters have 1968 hair or clothes, on an island with Caribbean voodoo and Asian natives (it was shot in the Philippines) as a high priest puts a curse (‘you are the ones who wanted to defy Hell, and now Hell has accepted the challenge!’) on a team of cancer research scientists who have failed to heal his daughter. A voodoo dancer is sucked into the ground and then appears as a fanged, fright-haired, gunk-slobbering witch who begins to spread a zombie plague. Jenny, the little daughter of some scientists, escapes and, twenty years later (played by Candice Daly), returns to the island on a weird holiday with a bunch of happy-go-lucky, goony-looking mercenaries – though the place reminds her of bad dreams she has always had about an island overrun by the living dead. Also in these parts is an academic team, including buff Chuck (Chuck Peyton, aka gay porn star Jeff Stryker), whose shirt is always open, and a strangely abusive professor (Massimo Vanni, aka Alex McBride) who tries to taunt his assistants into reading aloud from a handy Book of the Dead and is then surprised when his incantation summons up a horde of fast-moving, grabby zombies with rags over their faces who kill him.
Like Troll 2, it has unspeakable dialogue delivered at hysteria pitch – Stryker/Peyton is spectacularly dreadful, but it’s hard to see how anyone could shine given the material he is stuck with. The ‘fast’ zombies, some quite athletic, prefigure later living dead specimens – but they’re notably sillier than they are scary. The score samples bits from earlier movies, the look is frankly hideous, and the whole thing is almost endearingly wretched.