SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE (Christopher Landon). 92 minutes. Opens Friday(October 30). See listings. Rating: NN
If you’re going to fashion your zombie movie after Shaun Of The Dead, you really ought to know what you’re doing.
Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse – which should have stuck with its original title, Scouts Vs.Zombies – is a dopey horror comedy focused on a trio of teenage scouts, Ben (Tye Sheridan), Carter (Logan Miller) and Augie (Joey Morgan). Friends since childhood, they’re sophomores now and well into puberty, meaning Ben and Carter are tired of the Junior Woodchuck lifestyle and view Augie as a drag on their social lives. They’re ready to quit Scouts and move on, but haven’t been able to tell Augie yet.
It all comes to a head when they go camping on the night of the big senior party – which also happens to be the same day as the start of a zombie outbreak. Returning to find their small town overrun by the walking dead, with only resourceful cocktail waiter Denise (Sarah Dumont) still sporting a pulse, our heroes have to stay alive long enough rescue Ben’s crush Kendall (Halston Sage) at the party and get to safety. So, yeah, Shaun Of The Dead, with small-town American teenagers rather than 20-something Londoners.
It took four screenwriters – director Landon (Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones), Lona Williams (Drop Dead Gorgeous) and Emi Mochizuki and Carrie Evans (both of whom worked on College Road Trip) – to craft this lazy genre entry, which steals the premise and structure of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s 2004 masterwork but doesn’t understand it at all. They switch out the arrested development commentary and genuine emotional stakes for juvenile humour and climactic splatter gags stolen from Peter Jackson’s Dead-Alive.
As the young hero, Sheridan takes the material seriously – a reasonable approach for a kid who’s got The Tree Of Life, Mud and Joe on his resumé – but he’s too old to play a sophomore. While Dumont shows some decent comic chops, her role seems to have been hacked down in post-production so audiences wouldn’t want Ben to end up with Denise instead of Kendall.
David Koechner and Cloris Leachman appear as characters who are far more interesting as zombies, and get bashed around like the good sports they obviously are. Even dead, they’re having more fun than the audience.
