Ever since the critical and fan love for Zombieland the zombie genre enjoyed a huge boost which in turn was launched ten fold into the atmosphere by The Walking Dead, both properties which bridged the gap of horror fans and casual movie goers making the zombie genre very lucrative for studios. Because of this every idiot with a camera and every studio with the desire to deepen their pockets has gone and made a zombie film or television show often forgetting a lot of things that genre fans enjoy about zombies. Sometimes watering the necrosis of a zombie down or the fear factor in general, other times it's just to tell a story that happens to have zombies in it so it will get released. Back in the makeup heavy proving grounds that was the eighties, teenagers armed with mullets and fake blood helped bring us some of the best looking zombies ever, accompanied by masters of horror who genuinely cared to make something insane that you couldn't see anywhere else giving us creatures like the Muck Man or Bub. Ideas of putting unlikely groups against hordes of zombies. Christopher Landon whose credits include directing all but two of the Paranormal Activity movies as well as writing genre faves Disturbia and Viral crafted one of the most fun and gore filled zombie flicks I've seen in years. While I'm not a huge fan of the paranormal films, a job is a job until you get a dream project and this film feels like the culmination of a true horror fans dream gig. 
A hapless janitor at a secret research facility accidentally awakens a corpse that is seemingly kept comatose and it begins eating him as well as the scientist who stepped out of the room to snack on some takis. Meanwhile in the nearby town three sophomores Carter, Augie and Ben are part of their schools Boy Scout program and are preparing to go out for a big camp out in celebration of Augie receiving his Condor Badge. However Ben and Carter are tired of always getting picked on for being Scouts in high school and are tired of wasting all their time going out camping while everybody else is out partying. Carter bumping into his sister finds out about a huge party going on that night and Carter hopes to get lucky while Ben hopes to get in good with Carter's sister and they decide to sneak off once Augie is asleep that night to go join the party. Unbeknownst to the boys, Scout Master Rogers had gone out early in the evening to prepare the camp grounds where he ran into the now zombiefied scientist from before and together they spread the zombie virus throughout the town. The boys all set up camp without the Scout Master thinking its a challenge by him and later in the night Ben and Carter sneak off into the town to go party only to find that while they were camping the town has been overrun and evacuated without them. Together with a cocktail waitress armed with a shotgun, the boys must use all their Scout training to maneuver through the town and survive the night. To make matters worse, the party is still going unaware that the zombie apocalypse has come forcing the boys to go save Carter's sister before an aerial strike comes down on the town. 
This movie does not take itself seriously at all it's just insane fun. From the moment Blake from Workaholics awakens the zombie corpse after trying to give it CPR to the point where a crazy zombie cat lady with no teeth numbs on Carter's bare ass trying to eat him you know this flick is going to throw whatever the hell it wants at you. Honestly that's something I miss the most is seeing a horror comedy that will go there and just do fun gory risqué things. The risque element really comes from the fact that you're watching an old school coming of age film. Augie can't let go of being a scout, Carter just wants to get laid and goes as far as squeezing zombie boobs because he's probably never felt real ones, Ben is torn between being a good friend to Augie by doing something he hates and going off to becoming what he perceives to be an adult so he can maybe have a meaningful relationship with Carter's sister. These guys are Sophomores, they probably just grew hair on their balls and have no idea what the hell they're doing, to make matters worse they're completely clueless nerds, but if you need them to macguyver you a projectile weapon or in one case a bomb they're your guys. 
The cast in this thing is a pretty awesome assembly of newbies and up and comers. Ty Sheridan, Cyclops from X-Men Apocalypse, gives a lovable awkward performance that is just intensified by how neat and nerdy he wears his scout uniform. Logan Miller, Would You Rather, plays Carter on the level of pervertedness that would match Jonah Hill from Superbad and Pee-Wee from Porky's. Joey Morgan in his first role as Augie really gives the movie it's heart as he is the most dedicated Scout and has the most reason to be. His physical comedy comes from how clumsy he acts in the film often almost getting his friends killed but also the most versatile in macguyvering weapons, my favorite being the simple flamethrower he makes taking out his own Scout Master. David Koechner plays the Scout Master and mostly plays him zombiefied. Seeing Koechner constantly falling apart and hunting the kids through the whole movie is hysterical as he is constantly maimed but keeps coming, showing us what a great physical actor he is. Remember the cocktail waitress? Her name's Denise and she's played by Sarah Dumont who I've seen as kind of random characters in things but here she gets to be a true badass. She saves the boys from zombie strippers when the outbreak first occurs and then continues to be their grounding member as the boys are constantly bickering over being Scouts and calls them out for their awkwardness throughout the movie as hordes of zombies come at them. She's the kind of girl that when the boys are having a panic attack she runs out of shotgun shells and swings at the zombies with the shotgun to give the boys more time to figure stuff out. 
With zombie movies all I ask is we get some awesome looking zombies that puss, bleed and die in gruesome ways. There are a ton of makeup FX artists on here including Steven E Anderson who has big budget film credits from Willow to even the Angel TV series and Brian Kinney whose done a lot of Blumhouse work including the first two Insidious films. My personal favorite contribution was Tony Gardner who has done tons of animatronics in horror films from way back in the day and I could pinpoint the zombies he probably worked on in the film. At one point the boys accidentally hit a deer which gets up and runs away, it later attacks Scout leader Rogers in a hilarious fight where the deer ends up getting stabbed in the eye bleeding all over the Scout Leader. Obvious Gardner work, but the best is crazy cat lady has a slew of zombie kitties and one of them attaches itself to Augie, blood dripping from its neck. Got to love zombie puppets. The best zombie moment culminates in the end where the party is attacked. It starts with the nastiest sexual use of a zombie since Dr. Hill's head went to town on Barbara Crampton in Re-Animator and also serves to show how dumb some of these teens are. The boys break into a department store and create weapons of zombie evisceration from everything they can grab and break into the party with the Scorpion's Rock You Like a Hurricane at their backs as they slaughter the zombies in tons of awesomely badass and gory ways with blood splattering the camera. While the blood is a bit too CG for my taste it looks awesome and would probably be a great scene in 3D.
The worst thing about this flick was its release, it was an experiment to have both this and Landon's other film the Marked Ones released on VOD 17 days after the theatrical release and have some theaters drop them quickly in order to cash in on VOD, which gave the film little to no theatrical release. This campaign really killed the flick and any chances of a sequel as it made around 100,000 under its budget back in sales. This should've been a bigger deal and given a better chance as it plays out perfectly for a sequel and is just plain fun. Christopher Landon shows his fandom fully in this film with even having an in joke where you see a sign that says Haddonfield, the town in Halloween, is the next town over. I got to applaud the guy for making a kick ass zombie flick with all the trappings of a cult classic.
16 Days til' Halloween! Halloween!
16 Days til' Halloween! Silver Shamrock!
