Apparently the first one did alright from a financial standpoint, so 3 years later, we got a sequel, also directed by Glenn Miller.
And by sequel The Asylum means adding a number to the title, because despite the first one doing sequel bait at the very last second, this doesn’t follow up on the adventures of Kifo, undead silverback gorilla with a broken heart and rotting flesh, no. Guess trying to give the zombie gorilla a Frankenstein’s monster style “vengeance arc” was too much effort, so they didn’t do that.
What they did is the usual lazy bullshit, another undead animal rampage, what changes is the location and the set of characters, this time is game rangers and a group of poachers that have to begrudingly form an alliance in order to survive the mutated zombie animals and – once again – avoiding that the zombi virus spreads further. Oddly enough, the two movie are connected by the ending, when its revelead this is actually a prequel to the first Zoombies. Yay?
Still doesn’t explain who the fucks hires poachers to infiltrate an African animal refuge/zoo at night? And to capture what, with a sniper rifle and 2 cat-sized cages? They get porcupines in the cage, btw. That was worth parashooting a person, hiring a crack team of random poachers AND accidentally causing a zombie pandemic because a meerkat annoyed you by existing.
I’m not even joking, what caused the zombification is a custom tranquillizer, and this concoction somehow zombifies a meerkat. I guess this isn’t too absurd since a random serum zombified the monkeys in the first Zoombies, but it wasn’t clear, since the animals were already ill, and it wasn’t explained in any real capacity anyway. This is somehow worse, which is an achievement, in a way, and the explanation the movie tries to give in almost 1 hour in isn’t interesting, just boring.
The cast is completely different from the first Zoombies, the only returning actor is Jumarcus Mason (playing a completely different character), not that i recognize a single one of the new cast. I usually dig a little further into IMDB to see if there are some odd tidbits, but let’s be honest, you’ve probably never heard any of their names neither. Acting wise, it’s ok, it’s alright for this kinda movie……..MOSTLY. Not good acting overall, but who’s gonna go all out for Zoombies 2?
On the upside, the zombie animals happen and attack the humans in the first 10 minutes, so you don’t have to wait 30 or 40 minutes for the plot to moves along, but given how little plot we have, this also means the narrative struggles to maintain any kind of momentum, as it prematurely climaxed, and we have to wait and look forwards the filler, the packing peanuts, before we get to another animal attack, with decidely worst characters than the first Zoombies, mostly stupid, unlikeable or too easily prone to redemption when the script needs it.
And this one is noticeably harder to sit through for that reason, even with a smaller runtime than the first one, it’s so uninteresting even when it gets to what you may want from it (aka the gore and the animal attacks), a complete slog, a boring and bad movie, it’s not enough that it features mostly different and odd animals to see zombified (i didn’t expect zombi aardvarks) and kinda tries to elaborate more on the zombie virus, since it’s mostly done to pad things out even further.
The first Zoombies was really embarassing at times, but it provided some shlocky entertaiment, some amusing bullshit, a few laughs thanks to the really crappy CG. This time the CG is still crap in the same way, if not even worse, with sad, stiff digital animals and even crappier practical effects for gore when a meerkat burst outs of a dead person’s throath, so bad it’s sad, even more with animal sounds that seem randomly done by a person with their mouth. At least it makes for a load of craptacular screenshots, and that’s the way you should experience Zoombies 2, by not watching it.
Don’t bother with this one, The Asylum shouldn’t have either.
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