As versatile creatures as they are, there’s something about zombies that makes them perfect foils for comedy. Shambling, clueless beasts at the best of times, their easy-to-dissemble nature makes them prime candidates for some messy slapstick and their slow pace is perfect to allow the human leads to utter any number of quips, punchlines or wise cracks before they find themselves within biting range.
Numerous directors, such as Peter Jackson, Stuart Gordon and Dan O’ Bannon have taken the opportunity to add lashings of humour to their particular takes on zombie infestations, and in 2015, a pre-Happy Death Day Christopher Landon got to take his punt. Cue bursting heads, tearing flesh and a surprising, American Pie-style fixation on tits and ass, as the sex-obsessed, coming of age, teen flick meets undead gore blowout in Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse. Be prepared, and take notes, I guess…
Ben, Carter and Augie are three high school friends who have known each other since childhood thanks to all being in the Scouts; but although Augie still loves all the things that come with the uniform, Ben and Carter have been planning to leave as they realise that their peers deem it incredibly lame. But while Carter is convinced that ditching the Scouts will get them popularity and babes, the honest Ben is reluctant to turn his back on the loyal Augie, who has used the rapid collection of activity badges as a crutch since his father died. However, while all this is going on, in a nearby research laboratory, a bumbling janitor causes a potential disaster when he mistakenly has a run in with a zombified experiment. As the Zombie infection seemingly spreads through the town like wildfire, Ben, Carter and Augie remain oblivious while they camp out due to a recruitment drive. However, Carter has a plan to get Ben and him into a “secret seniors party” that’ll see the booze flow and the boobies bounce, but between avoiding Augie and scoring alcohol, the boys finally discover that they’re in the midst of a zombie outbreak, with the undead assholes already swarming the entire area.
Luckily for them, they team up with Denise, a school dropout and cocktail waitress at local skin bar “Lawrence Of A-Labia”, who manages to boast some impressive survival skills, and when combined with the Scouts smarts of our three leads, they form a formidable team against their flesh-eating foes. But while fleeing from zombie-cats, enticing a member of the undead to sing Britney Spears and getting into a compromised position involving a trampoline and a stretchy undead penis, the group still has to locate and infiltrate the seniors party if they’re going to save the remaining survivors and stop them from getting swamped under a bloody hogpile of flesh-scoffing bodies.
While running the risk of sounding a little stupid, I’ve always been a little curious over the fact that Christopher Landon made this film. For a start, the director has since made a name for himself helming genre blending films with punchy concepts such as Happy Death Day (Groundhog Day as a slasher) and Freaky (Freaky Friday as a slasher), that boast quite a well rounded and amusing look a teen behaviour. However, with Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse, we find him delivering one of those unfeasibly horny comedies that trades heavily on sex, jiggling boobs and dick jokes which seems like an immensely strange choice for a director who has since come out as openly gay. In fact, the film goes so far into the crass end of the humor spectrum, it pulls a couple of moments that prove to be more than a little creepy, such as Carter taking a moment to chance a squeeze of the beasts of a trapped, topless zombie with an admittedly immense bust, or David Koechner’s zombified Dolly Parton enthusiast inadvertently motorboating a statute of his idol while “9 to 5” plays on the soundtrack. Some more extreme setpieces seem a little out of place altogether, such as a gag where a droopy tongued zombie performs cunnilingus on an unsuspecting partygoer, but Landon seems to be on more solid footing when dealing with outlandish needledrops and less sexually obsessed gore.
An early moment that sees someone perform chest compressions on a zombie only for the corpses chest to completely cave in is a neat riff on The Thing. And The final attack on the party carries more than a little DNA from the lawnmower scene from Peter Jackson’s Braindead. However, those strange examples of zombified, adolescent, misogyny aside, Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse manages to recover a lot of ground by trying to employ the same heart-to-gore ratio James Gunn utilised with the supremely icky Slither.
When not clinging tenaciously to an incredibly stretchy zombie weiner, Tye Sheridan gets to flex some nice-guy, leading man muscles before his roles in Ready Player One and X-Men: Apocalypse and there’s a lot of heartfelt, coming of age stuff to be found as the central trio break up and then make up while Sarah Dumont’s Denise teaches Ben how to kiss. However, while Landon’s heart is in the right place, when compared to the effortless humour seen the likes of Shaun Of The Dead, Scouts Guide just feels like it’s trying too hard a lot of the time.
That’s not to say that there’s not some good stuff to be found. While the moments featuring a zombie cat and a Britney Spears sing-a-long seem like the start of running jokes or plot threads that were since abandoned, they still deliver those all-important chuckles, and a moment where Carter has his bare-butt gummed by a toothless, undead old woman is just too ludicrous not to be funny – but a lot of the time, Landon struggles to make the sweeter aspects of the film merge with the extreme, sexualised gore in a way that manages to properly compliment either. That’s not to say that I don’t love a bit of off-colour gore – I tend to thrive on it actually; it’s just that a lot of the time, it doesn’t seem to fit the film that it’s in and it proves to be more distracting or surprising than actually funny. Still, when treated as a kickabout, throwaway comedy, it’s certainly silly and colourful enough to fill it’s brief run time. It’s definitely a strange, wobbly progression from Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, to the more teen friendly likes of Happy Death Day, but you can’t claim that it fails to do what it says on the tin.
It’s not always successful when trying to combine fratboy, tits-obsessed humour with genuine heart, but you can’t say that Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse isn’t dull. It’s certainly dumb, and sometimes doesn’t quite know what kind of movie it wants to be from one scene to the next – but the wall to wall gore and party atmosphere will probably play like Citizen Kane to a clutch of sweaty fifteen year-olds.
🌟🌟🌟
Where to watch Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse: