Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

By almost no one’s qualifications of what a good movie should look like, I’m thinking that the legendary Italian schlock director Lucio Fulci ‘Zombi 3’ comes about as far from those qualifications as humanly possible. Note that I don’t think there was a ‘Zombi 2’ so I don’t where the title actually comes from. This is a movie that is stupid, stupider still, is erratic, poorly acted and features 1968 style special effects in a 1988 movie. And did we mention that it was stupid? Thus this could be one of the reasons that ‘Zombi 3’ is absolutely, positively required viewing.

The government… which nation this government belongs to I can’t tell you… but the government is in the process of transporting its new top notch super secret, super lethal biological warfare weapon clandestinely named ‘Death One’. Then some terrorist dude rushes the doctor transporting Death One, but he doesn’t get far, considering he’s on foot and the army is in a helicopter, when this completely irresponsible army shoots a hole in the Death One container but somehow allows this terrorist to get free. The Doc isn’t worried because Death One will totally disappear once it hits oxygen, until The General informs The Doc that the terrorist dude escaped and is infected. Oh snap!

Before we go any further you should know that one of the things that make ‘Zombi 3’ so special is that it almost encourages audience interaction. It would very difficult for anybody to watch this movie and not engage in a consistent dialog with ones television screen. Anyway The General has this situation on lock. He finds the dude at a local villa and to stop further infection simply kills everybody who happens to be at that villa. He then burns this dude which The Doc believes qualifies The General as an unqualified idiot, and he would be correct in this assumption, because now The General has mutated Death One and sent it to the sky creating bird zombies. Outstanding.

This introduces us to our ‘heroine’ Patricia (Beatrice Ring). Patricia doesn’t really do anything heroic in this movie except be a complete and total burden to her co-stars, but she does look like she will be final girl material. The problems start when Patricia and her man find a shitload of dead birds in the middle of the road and decide to get out the car and get the dead birds out of the road. Does that make any kind of sense? And

when the dead birds start reanimating themselves they get closer to the birds… and thus they get what they got coming. So Patricia’s man is all f’d up, filled will bleeding pulsating boils and Patricia decides what he needs is a glass of water. That’s exactly what I was thinking. Patricia drives up to an abandoned shack of a gas station covered in cobwebs because everyone knows that abandoned shacks have working water faucets. Me and my TV are really having some spirited conversations right now. Regardless the boyfriend isn’t thirsty anymore… Except for Her Blood! That’s what he said, for real.

Anyway our other heroes are some soldiers on leave who have stumbled upon a tour bus of hotties which was attacked by the zombie birds. Our soldiers and the hotties find an abandoned resort, the same resort where The General found Patient Zero, to hole up. While there, a couple of our poor souls are hungry and decide to go down in the kitchen to see what’s available. Well, while there was nothing there to eat before they got there, now there’s plenty eat. Hello mister zombie and his friend the classic levitating flying zombie head!

Meanwhile The General now realizes there’s a problem. His solution? Kill everybody. Everybody. The Doc is outraged at this course of action because he and his team is just days, or months, or years away from a cure. Besides, the General never warned him of the dangers of this weapon. A weapon that HE designed that is called DEATH ONE. Well zombies are everywhere, The General is killing everybody and our burden of a final girl and her heroic soldier boy (Deran Sarafian) are the only ones left, I think, to save the world. A world where zombies are rocking the microphone. It’s complicated.

Without spending anymore time than we’ve already wasted on this movie, ‘Zombi 3’ is simply fantastic. No sir, this is not a good movie, but if you can more fun watching a crap movie not named ‘Mega Piranha’ then I want to see that movie. This movie had three freaking directors, for whatever reason, including one Bruno Mattei which might explain why this movie was so incredibly over the top. Then we have our zombies who on one hand move like zombies, all slow and stuff… that’s when they’re not Carl Lewis running you down, swinging from vines, driving cars or engaging you in conversation. Our filmmakers did whatever was required at that particular time with absolutely no regard to the scene before it. By the time we get to the zombie D.J. spinning records it’s pretty clear that these cats stopped trying to make a real movie a long time ago.

With the worlds stupidest zombie fodder from the worlds dumbest General to zombies spinning old Marvin Gaye tunes, to call ‘Zombi 3’ anything less than the classic it is would be doing this movie a grave disservice.