I guess I solved the mistery. For some unknown reasons these LUA files use the sequence of bytes 0xef 0xbf 0xbd at the place of the 0x00 byte, that sequence of 3 bytes is indeed often used as an unicode "REPLACEMENT CHARACTER"
Open one of these lua files with a hex editor and use the "Replace" feature for replacing all the occurrencies of these 3 bytes with the byte 0x00. Save the file and try a decompiler like http://sourceforge.net/projects/unluac/files/ on it.