I had an evening to myself. I could have done anything. They were showing the 50th anniversary revival of The Godfather just fifteen minutes’ walk away. I really had no excuse not to enjoy this classic of American cinema again, beyond piddling little concerns like already having been out to the movies twice that week. So I stayed in and watched Zombeavers instead. What can I say? I don’t know what came over me.
Zombeavers, directed by Jordan Rubin, doesn’t so much have a plot as a collection of bits nicked from other genre movies and repurposed for this one. (In case you were wondering, in genre terms I’m pretty sure this is attempting the tricky challenge of being both a horror movie and a comedy film.) There’s a sense in which watching it for the first time doesn’t really feel like watching a new movie at all, because virtually no element of it is actually unfamiliar.
It opens with a couple of low-comedy stereotyped rednecks failing to notice a barrel of industrial waste falling off the back of their truck when it hits a deer (which gorily explodes all over the windscreen) – this is essentially the first scene of Eight Legged Freaks, too. The barrel drifts down a river during the opening credits, coming to rest in a peaceful lake, not far from the dam of some cute looking, obviously fake beavers. At this point it springs a leak and starts spraying green slime.
Ho, ho. Genre boxes continue to be ticked as we meet three college girls about to set off for a quiet break in the country. As you might expect, one of them is sensible and studious (she wears glasses), one is essentially defined by her boyfriend problems, and the other is kind of a bee-hatch (as I believe the kids nowadays put it). They are respectively played by Rachel Melvin, Lexi Atkins and Cortney Palm. Off they go to the countryside, engaging in the obligatory modern sexually-explicit banter all the way.
But something is up at the peaceful lake which is their destination. We the audience have already figured this out, as we have seen a fisherman have his rod dragged out of his hands by something in the water, and then be set upon by something lurking in the bushes. Some sort of quota is met as Palm provides some T&A by taking her top off when the girls go swimming.
You can’t do much of a horror movie with just three main characters and a few supporting yokels, so the boyfriends all turn up despite being told not to. This is because Atkins’ boyfriend has just cheated on her, a subplot designed to create tension within the group – this is about the most subtle element of the film and it’s still something of a genre cliché.
The sense of déjà vu becomes crushingly relentless as Atkins prepares to take a shower, but finds herself ambushed by a beaver. But it is not a beaver as we know it, as it has milky eyes and a taste for flesh. In short, it is an undead beaver, which the assembled young people only just manage to stuff into a bag and batter into submission.
I expect that most people, at some point in their lives, have asked themselves the question, ‘If I were making a low-budget movie featuring undead beavers as a major plot element, how would I go about realising this?’ The makers of Zombeavers decided to go with glove puppets. The glove puppet zombie beaver is actually a reasonable success, as this is supposed to be a comedy film and it is almost certainly the funniest thing in it so far. However, it is not that funny.
It turns out the industrial waste has produced a whole lake full of undead beavers, which are now hungry for the flesh and blood of blandly attractive young American folk. Even worse, they find themselves trapped, as the zombie beavers have blocked the road back to civilisation by felling trees across it. Barricading themselves into the cabin is not an ideal solution as the beavers show every sign of being able to chew their way through the walls. What are a bunch of extremely thinly-scripted young people to do in this situation?
Well, anyway: this is a crappy movie. In my defense, and it’s a thin one as I will freely admit, I was lured in by the commercial, which focused very much on the glove puppet zombie beavers. These are, I will say again, the best thing in the movie. Are they sufficient reason to watch the whole thing? I suspect not. I would say, just watch a clip, maybe one of the sequence where they start gnawing up through the floorboards and get splattered by two of the surviving cast like a gory version of whack-a-mole. Just watch that and then do something more worthwhile with the rest of your evening, like staring at the wall.
You can see that the intention with this movie was to do something along the lines of The Evil Dead meets The Killer Shrews. The Killer Shrews, I should say, is not a great movie. It has bad acting, risible monsters, and contains problematic racism. But not only is it just as funny as Zombeavers, it also works better as a horror movie, because it’s doing its best not to admit to being a lousy low-budget film. It confesses to its weaknesses because it has no choice. Zombeavers, on the other hand, doesn’t include rubbish glove-puppet monsters because it has no choice, and then try to work around them as much as possible. It has rubbish-glove puppet monsters because it thinks this will be funny, and the camera dwells on them cheerfully for this reason. What’s killingly funny in an unintentional comedy doesn’t work nearly as well in an actual comedy.
Part of the problem is that Zombeavers can’t decide whether it wants to be a spoof of low-budget horror films or an actual horror-comedy itself, because they’re not the same thing. It’s much more committed to traditional elements of the form, like excessive gore and gratuitous sex and T&A, than a film like The Final Girls (a genuinely funny and inventive take on horror movie conventions), but this feels like an attempt to impress through excess, something which is an extension of the film’s attempts to get laughs by shocking the audience. There are times when it’s just trying to be funny, but there’s never a moment when it’s sincerely trying to be genuinely scary.
It kind of stumbles through its hour-and-a-half or whatever the run-time is; the glove-puppet beavers run out of mileage before this and so they have to resort to a gag where anyone bitten by a zombie beaver doesn’t just turn into a zombie, they turn into a zombie with huge buck teeth and a big flat tail. Again, once you’re past the initial gag this doesn’t really go anywhere, and the human-beaver hybrid prosthetics are a lot less funny than the glove-puppets were.
The problem, finally, is that Zombeavers is so knowingly and carefully stupid that it doesn’t work as anything but a trashy, lowest-common-denominator comedy, but it’s not consistently funny enough to work as one of those, either. You can see the cast trying to do their best with it, and the gag reel at the end certainly indicates they had fun making the movie, but even including the gag reel was probably a mistake. It’s never a good thing when the people making a movie are clearly having more fun than you are watching it. This movie is just about as stupid as the title suggests, but a lot less entertaining.
No Chic. Just Geek. 