“Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” sees twofold brain chomping: The zombies feast on human brains, and the movie eats away at the audience’s.
Unfortunately for the horror comedy, one and a half hours of cheesy clichés, leering teen banter and countless breast close-ups don’t amount to much hilarity.
Zombie fans have seen the premise many times before: A strange, unexplained disease breaks out from a laboratory causing humans and animals to suddenly begin gorging on each others’ flesh.
It’s then up to a trio of intrepid scouts and a shotgun-wielding cocktail waitress to save their town from the undead hordes.
The main problem with the film is its glaring lack of originality; two of the three scouts are nothing but hollow caricatures. Carter (Logan Miller) is the backwards-cap wearing best friend whose two main objectives in life are to get laid and snag himself a breast-filled profile picture. Augie (Joey Morgan) is clearly supposed to be the DUFF, which stands for designated ugly fat friend, who is always trying to do the right thing.
Carter’s constant stream of “yo mama” jokes and cringeworthy sexual fantasies might be just about bearable, if they weren’t reinforced by the film’s lurid male gaze. It might be naive to expect better from director Christopher B. Landon, whose previous oeuvres include the snore-inducing “Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones,” but he really hasn’t done himself any favors with “Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse.”
Landon takes a leaf out of Michael Bay’s guide to portraying female characters: Whenever a female character appears on screen, whether zombified or not, the camera frames her from an overtly male perspective. The film really does have a “Transformers”-esque sensibility to it, being punctuated by intense close-ups of breasts, mostly those of leading woman Denise (Sarah Dumont). As unlikely as fighting a zombie apocalypse in neckerchiefs and scout shorts may seem, it is not as far-fetched as Denise’s white tank top, denim mini shorts and towering heels.
Although her character may be an attempt to subvert the stereotype of the damsel in distress, this is undermined by her outfit and Carter’s regular promises of what he would do to her if there weren’t hordes of zombies chasing them.
Ben (Tye Sheridan), the scouting trio’s leader and the film’s hero, is the only tolerable character in the movie. He is the precise middle ground between Carter and Augie: He is tempted to sneak away from a camp-out and crash the secret senior party, while his conscience tells him he shouldn’t.
He is definitely the character the audience is supposed to relate to, the guy who has to make a difficult choice between his friends and deliver the cheesy “we’re in this together” speech when all hope seems lost near the end of the movie. Sheridan’s performance is honest if unspectacular, although he stands out as a shining beacon in comparison with the rest of the cast.
Some might argue that “Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” was always going to be terrible – just the name for a start would be enough to put most people off – saying that’s it’s the just the standard teen Halloween fare. Frankly, this mindset is disappointing.
It’s a shame that studios have to resort to producing films like “Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” to balance their substantial check books. It seems that Hollywood has gotten the idea stuck in its brain that throwaway action movies and horror flicks aimed at teenage boys are to be the norm.
Maybe the best remedy would be for a zombie to come and munch the idea out.
– William Thorne