It’s been a long time since we’ve had an unrelated sequel to Lucio Fulci’s Zombi. In fact, I think this might be the first unrelated sequel to Zombi that’s (supposed to be) related to Zombi! As far as these things go, you can do worse, but not much.
Hannah (Jennifer Nangle from Amityville Karen) does one of those 23 and Me deals and finds her long-lost father (Noel Scott Jason) is living on an island in the Caribbean. You know, that island where there was that mysterious outbreak that the government covered up forty years ago? Anyway, she and her friends go down to the island only to discover her father has been infected with some sort of virus. They get him back home (“We barely got through security with him!”) and naturally, they discover the virus he’s carrying is a zombie virus. It doesn’t take long for him to bite someone, which eventually leads to a global zombie plague.
Even though Zombi VIII: Urban Decay is only fifty-seven minutes long, there is a shit ton of padding to be found. The opening and closing credits sequences go on forever, there are annoying YouTube videos and news reports that act as exposition, and lots of screen time is taken up by characters walking through the jungle and/or taking pictures. (The shots of animals look like vacation footage from a zoo.) We also have a long scene where a character watches Night of the Living Dead on TV and the camera just lingers on it for minutes at a time. I guess this is supposed to be an in-joke since Zombi was a sequel/rip-off to Dawn of the Dead, but there was no reason to show whole scenes from the movie.
Like most Shot-on-Video productions, the sound is really bad. There’s a long car ride where the sound of the engine drowns out nearly all the dialogue, and it’s hard to hear the actors during the outdoor scenes too. The videography is also rather poor as the screen periodically flashes red for no apparent reason. (It may have been an encoding error, I’m not sure.)
It's not all bad though. The music, which is a homage to the score from the original Zombi is quite good. I also enjoyed the Return of the Living Dead-inspired scene where Samantha McCullough gets high and does a striptease just before a zombie attack. We also get a variation on the original’s iconic splinter-to-the-eye scene, although it feels kind of rushed. The complete non-ending is rather infuriating though and probably cost the flick at least a ½ *.
AKA: Zombie Flesh Eaters 5.
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