Zoombies 2 (2019)
- Andrew Smith
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
"They're not just deadly...they're dead!"
Plot
When a team of poachers breaks into a large wildlife conservation preserve and uses a special tranquilizer to sedate the animals, they have no idea what they are about to unleash. The drugs transform the animals into bloodthirsty zombies which proceed to wreak havoc amongst the poachers and the game rangers on hand to try and arrest them. The survivors from both groups must forge an alliance and band together to stop the beasts before the virus spreads to the entire world.
Review
The Asylum's Zoombies turned out to be one of their more entertaining films to date, with plenty of energy and good intentions, though it was a terrible concoction of bad writing and poor special effects with some ‘so bad, it’s good’ moments of pure cheese. I mean no one, and I mean no one, can go into a film about zombie zoo animals with a straight face and expect it to be anything but a pile of rubbish. But Zoombies was idiotic fun if you knew the sort of level you were going to get. It had a memorable idea, something different, which obviously the studio thought had some more mileage in it. Sequel worthy though? Zoombies 2 was hardly rushed into development straight away and so three years later, we have a sequel which basically covers all the same bases as the original, with some new animals and a new location but all the same glaring issues as before. Whilst I could tolerate the original because it was a novelty act, this one is just plain terrible.
There is little here to link it with the original, outside for one major scene towards the end which actually turns this into a prequel rather than a sequel, and so for the most, Zoombies 2 works standalone. Well, when I say works, I mean it doesn’t need to do anything universe/mythology building and can get down to the fun stuff as soon as possible. A sense of fun is what the film really needs because it plays everything so damned straight. It will be impossible not to crack a few laughs and smiles at the shenanigans on show, yet everything is so seriously delivered that it borders on farcical. Writer Scotty Mullen and director Glenn Miller both return to deliver the same payload as they did previously. What they do serve up is a rinse and repeat formula which gets tiresome quickly, even at the spritely eighty-four minutes length. If you want consistency, then these guys are your men because Zoombies 2 does feel like a proper follow-up, with similar strengths and the same weaknesses. You might have hoped for a better improvement in quality in the following years but no luck.
With some of the characters being stuck outside in the park and others trapped inside, there are plenty of interactions with different animals. Killer meerkats, aardvarks and porcupines don't have the same level of threat as the animals from the original, but it would be boring if you saw the same things over again. The animals may be extensive enough to stave off boredom for a while, but the special effects are so clumsy that any animal attack sequences become more of a joke than anything. The special effects haven't gotten any better in the three years since the original; arguably they've gotten worse. There's a rhino stampede sequence in which some characters try and escape in a jeep pursued by a zombie horde of grey blobs - I think they had one animation model that they just copied and pasted because every single rhino looks and moves the same way. It would be wrong for me to single out any one animal – the porcupine, the aardvarks and the meerkat look equally as ridiculous as each other and none of them will ever feel like they’re interacting with the characters they’re trying to kill. At least they do kill a lot of characters so if you're tiring of one animal, then another will be around in the next scene to whittle the cast down a bit more.
The former Miss Missouri, Eric Sturdefant, looks amazing, sort of like a young version of Catherine Zeta-Douglas, but she's not exactly selling to me that she's a scientist/conservationist. Likewise, the group of poachers don't appear to be the sort of resourceful and intelligent people that would be able to sneak into guarded preserves, with Terra Strong's token sassy female character seemingly coming straight from the streets with her potty mouth and aggression. There are plenty of other non-descript characters here, just named individuals with a handful of lines who are served as zoombie fodder, and they're all equally as atrocious. Worst offender is Jumarcus Mason who irritatingly plays the annoying black man like some low budget Kevin Hart, firing off some cringy lines before a quick death at the hands of a hippo. Every time he opened his mouth I was shouting "dude, just shut up already" at the screen. Only Jonathan Buckley, as Randy the lead ranger, comes off with any sort of credit but that's only because he's a pretty big guy anyway who just looks like a ranger in his uniform and this sort of action man role doesn't seem to stretch him too much.
Final Verdict
Zoombies 2 is just more of the same carnage which, if it’s what you’re looking for, will do what is needed with all the same tackiness and cheapness as before. But because it’s just more of the same, it fails to kick on with any meaningful improvement over its predecessor and is a worse end product as a result.
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Zoombies 2 Director(s): Glenn Miller Writer(s): Scotty Mullen Actor(s): Erica Sturdefant, Jonathon Buckley, Jarrid Masse, Terra Strong, Jumarcus Mason, Caleb Thomas, Peter Stickles, Troy Castaneda Duration: 84 mins |  |
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