Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse

"Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse"

"As Reported by Dollyforme"

I tried to catch this movie in the theatre – but had to settle for a REdbox rential. “Zombie Apocalypse" -- a gory/horny teen-oriented comedy-adventure – it was only given a linied theatre release - the movie was rejected by most of the large cinema chains -- including Regal, Cinemark, etc. -- because Paramount announced it would make each film available to home viewers via video-on-demand options just 17 days after its theatrical run dropped below 300 screens. (Due to the boycott, the movie opened in about 1,500 theaters. That's a low number for a Zombie genre film.

As a result, the movie made little money at the national box office, and received little publicity locally. Yet since I love horror movies, so off to Redbox I went..

Anyway, "Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse" (R, 93 min.) is a coarsely explicit groin-centric slapstick and trendy. Zompocalypse theme aside, this is a surprisingly lively and agreeably goofy throwback to the “Fright Night”-style teen horror comedies of the 1980s, as three high-school scouts -- the handsome shy guy (Tye Sheridan), the crude joker (Logan Miller) and the fat kid (Joey Morgan) -- use their merit-badge skills to survive a zombie outbreak that numbers David Koechner and Cloris Leachman among the infected.

If ever a movie should have been cut to a PG-13 to reach its ideal audience, this is it: Its over-the-top violence and especially its sexual curiosity are aimed right at the sweet spots of tweenage boys, as demonstrated when the scouts are befriended by a wise, resourceful stripper (Sarah Dumont) in cutoffs and a tight tank top. The director is Christopher Landon, carrying on something of a family tradition: His father, Michael, was the star of “I Was a Teenage Werewolf.”

In Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller and Joey Morgan, the movie has three likeable leads, whose characters are given a little space to do something other than flaunt the story’s lewd schtick. The problem, is that the film’s frat humour opens the door to an unreconstructed world in which women are either unobtainable princesses or sluts, and all the boys’ idiotic assumptions about sex go unchallenged by someone who could have mined their misogyny for laughs, say a woman imported from reality.

Landon may argue that Sarah Dumont’s pole dancer – the de facto forth member of the troupe is that feminoid, but she’s really just a world weary pair of mammaries with a hard luck story. The boys grow to respect her, natch, but only for the insight she can provide on getting laid. The movie’s denouement offers a joke about a revenge fuck – Sheridan’s mother for Miller’s sister. So the movie recalls ’80’s movies like Porky’s, a movie that remembered its apostrophe, in attitude as well as tone. Sexual retardation is a staple of teen sex comedy of course, but without in-movie challenges it’s also a celebration of the same.

Scouts Guide… may be backward but it’s not lazy. The screenplay (two of the writers are women, folks) has some nice comic set ups and a few jokes that reward mid to long memories. In a movie where the best you can hope for is enough irreverence and silliness to justify the rental price (though not wit, obviously), Landon succeeds in generating a few belly laughs and many more lip curls using these very tools. To boot there’s eye pleasing gore and appalling, old school puppetry – in other words, all the stuff that good bad movies are made of.