I blame George Romero for the fact that zombie movies have been done to the death (pun intended!) However it is still possible to churn out a crowd-pleaser that tickles the old funny bone. I came to this movie with absolutely no expectations of it being anything but a reworking of the old clichés, so I was pleasantly surprised to find it both fresh and entertaining. Mind you, it was a box office failure and the main reviewers whose word we should accept as Gospel dismissed it as feeble juvenilia.
Now I am some generations away from my teens and do consider myself a serious film buff, but there is nothing wrong with welcoming a good laugh. This movie has great visual humour along with its over-the-top gore, (I admit I do love to see a messy exploding head!), and I found myself laughing out loud throughout. If an old fogey like me is able to appreciate the critics' accused bad taste, then the movie is well on its way to acquiring cult status.
Briefly the film follows three teen-aged boy scouts, high school sophomores, over the course of one night. While they are camping in the woods, their town becomes contaminated with rampant zombie-ism and only they, with their multi-badge skills, can save the day. The storyline is somewhat more complicated insofar as two of the three (who secretly are ashamed to still be scouts) want to sneak off to attend a senior class rave, hoping to return to their tents before their third friend realises they are gone -- fat chance, he's soon on their tail. Their scout-master also seems to have gone AWOL, but of course he's been infected, along with the rest of the town, its animals -- in fact just about everyone but one of the strippers at the local titty-bar. Can the four of them locate the isolated senior party (they've been given a phony address) before their schoolmates succumb to the zombie horde?
The main players are all relatively unknown. Rising teen talent Tye Sheridan is Ben the most sensible of the three and probably the eldest since I didn't think sophomores would be able to drive at night. He made a mark as a child actor in "The Tree of Life" (2011) and "Mud" (2012) and can be forgiven for 'slumming' in this comedic horror rather than pursuing more serious career choices. His horny friend Carter is played by Logan Miller who has been around for a while, but not noticeably. The third scout Augie, played by Joey Morgan in his debut role, was probably selected because he's chubby and comes across as childish. (He's the only one of the three who still takes scouting seriously). The fourth member of the zombie-fighting mob is the stripper Denise, played by Sarah Dumont, who has nothing outstanding in her filmography, but who is a likeable ally here for the three teenagers. In fact the only 'name' in the cast is an unrecognizable 90-year old Cloris Leachman who has thrown herself into the silly spirit of the movie. As a point of interest, a very minor role is taken by one Patrick Schwarzenegger -- yes, son of Arnie.
The film may be gory but the violence is cartoony rather than scary, and the laughs keep coming. Who would have thought that you could giggle at Ben's escaping from an upper window onto a trampoline by swinging on a stretchy zombie penis or by Carter's copping a feel of a topless busty zombie pole-dancer. Yes, that's the level of some of the humour, but it's all so fast-paced that one chuckle merges into the next, from fighting off Leachman's zombified cats to David Koechner's never-say-die scoutmaster with his floppy toupee. In addition, one can only admire how the boys' scout skills enable them to improvise some ingenious Rube Goldberg weapons to fight off the menacing mob.
Maybe I should be ashamed of myself, but I found the film a blast.
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