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Plenty of times you watch a bad film and come out sighing: “That’s a shame, there was a good movie in there somewhere!” Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse offers no such frustration. This is idiocy from soup to nuts, devoid of any clever ideas, meaningful performances or memorable set pieces. But it isn’t wholly without merit, as there are a few jocular gross-outs involving squished undead breasts, ripped ghoul penises and the entrails of a belligerent deer. For teens that are too old to go trick-or-treating but aren’t quite of age to go barhopping, this low-budget flick offers a handful of amusements as it perpetuates our poisonous, conformist popular culture.
After an energetic and largely wordless prologue in which a dopey janitor at a biotech firm unleashes a viral plague, we meet our male teen heroes. Ben (Tye Sheridan) is a decent kid who feels guilty for wanting to ditch his nerdy friend Augie (Joey Morgan) and enter the world of parties and skirt-chasing with Carter (Logan Miller). For years the three have been Scouts (note: never Boy Scouts, as we must assume they couldn’t get that name) but Augie is the only one who takes it seriously. Carter convinces Ben that the twerpy uniform is killing their game, and when they get invited to an older kids’ secret rave, he agrees it’s time to move on. But as they sneak away from camp one night – even if it does come after a montage of true, pure scoutin’ fun – that’s when the mayhem begins.
The first victim is their dorky leader (David Koechner), whose only character note is that he’s obsessed with Dolly Parton. It’s mostly so we can have a grunting, lamp-smashing brawl between he and Augie to the strains of 9 to 5. Meanwhile, Ben and Scout run afoul of a brain-hungry horde at a strip club (Lawrence of Alabia’s, har har har) and end up teamed with Denise (Sarah Dumont) a notorious high school dropout a few years their senior whose white tank top is so tight it’s a wonder this poor woman didn’t asphyxiate during production.
The action scenes are routine, but do pep up when they finally get silly. Legendary comedian Cloris Leachman, age 89, plays the crazy cat lady next door, and you know what they say: when you introduce a hissing feline in act one, you need to infect it with supernatural powers by act three. The chase eventually leads to the big teen dance, where Carter’s sister (and Ben’s crush) is trapped, and only the boys’ scouting skills can save her. (The absurdity of an enormous warehouse with professional lighting, state-of-the-art sound and hundreds of lithe sexpots dancing the night away in the middle of Nowhereseville, Suburbia is never addressed.)
As Ben uses the crises as an opportunity to gain confidence, Carter continues to make lewd jokes. And while it’s fair to say that many a 15-year-old boy keeps prurience paramount, even if it were the end of the world, there are one too many instances in which the film itself is laughing with the sexist remarks, not at them. (It’s easy to pitch a film as “a horror Superbad”, but not as easy to write a script with the scope of Superbad.)
It’s to Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse’s misfortune that the basic storyline (town succumbs to supernatural mayhem, band of misfits races to central location to save the day) is currently playing out in two other, far superior films. There’s less nudity in Goosebumps, but what it loses in cleavage it makes up for in genuinely creativity, while the New Zealand horror-comedy pic Deathgasm can show this wussy wide release a thing or two about being subversive. Looks like someone won the redundancy badge.
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