Comedy/Horror – 2014 – 77 Minutes
This film was a selection for BEBE 2017.
Did you know that the second syllable of “zombie” is like the letter “B”? So, you could, like, put “zom” in front of things that start with “B” and create whole new zom things! Zombadgers! Zombeagles! Zombeetles! (Or, if you’re musically inclined, Zombeatles.)
Pick something, staple it onto “zom” then grab a wikipedia article for some interesting facts and you’ve got yourself a premise! Toss in a remote cabin, a trio of bikini-clad college students and their dumbass boyfriends and you’ve got yourself a script! Cap it off with some barely passable puppets, gallons of dyed corn-syrup and a helping of gratuitous nudity and you, you my friend, have got yourself a movie.
Risking cliché, two incompetent delivery men lose a barrel of toxic waste which contaminates the local beaver dam. Three sorority sisters are visiting a cabin on the same lake to commiserate about the infidelity of one of their boyfriends. They do this in bikinis, with the designated “bad girl” going topless. In the evening, the boyfriends show up and things go soap opera.
The next day, the horror side of the story begins in earnest. The now undead beavers attack the group and the few other incidental characters introduced earlier. The effects are… terrible. The beavers – sorry, zombeavers – are sloppy, floppy puppets slathered in goo and thrown at the squirming actors. They’re often in bright sunlight which does nothing to hide the many flaws.
Later, when night falls, both the horror and the effects improve markedly. The human makeup effects, while goofy, are significantly better than the creature work. The script, free of exposition and relationship development, is leaner and, with most of the chaff killed off, the better actors are able to step up their game.
Kidding aside, this is as good as you’d expect from the title; maybe even a bit better than it deserves to be. An uneven script and effects are offset by a solid third act and mostly likable actors. Zombie aficionados may turn their noses, but as teenage zombie romps go, this is definitely one of the better ones.
