Verdict
Summary
Fido and Warm Bodies cross-pollinated with Disney’s High School Musical series has created this incredibly obvious agenda piece, and with a constant barrage of song and dance numbers and squeaky clean horror tropes (the zombies eat cauliflower mixed with brains), Z-O-M-B-I-E-S emerges as one of the most bizarre movies I’ve seen in awhile.
Plot: Students from Zombietown are transferred to a high school in a suburban town preoccupied with uniformity, traditions and pep rallies.
Review: Fifty years after a zombie apocalypse, a small enclave town has gotten their s-h-i-t together and has tamed the zombie horde living outside of the town’s massive walls. The zombies are given their own place to live (Zombie Town), and eventually society allows them to integrate into regular places … like school. The big day arrives at Seabrook High, and cool zombie kid Zed (Milo Manheim) strongly believes that this will be his big year. He has aspirations to join the football team, and his friends also dream big and hope to join science clubs, cheerleading, etc. When they get to school they’re ushered into a side entrance like second-class citizens, are shown their basement schoolroom, and told they can’t commingle with the humans. Humans still fear the zombies (with good reason: without their taming bracelets, they’d be raging shamblers), and poor Zed immediately crushes hard on cute cheerleader Addison (Meg Donnelly), whose cousin Bucky (Trevor Tordjman) is the most popular kid in school, but also a massive bigot against anyone who’s not as cool as he is. With the zombies at school, it becomes inevitable that Addison bumps into Zed (in a meet cute scene) in an improbable scenario, and before long they’re dating (she dyes his zombie-green hair black to mask his identifying marks), and soon the whole school is seeing that zombies are actually cool and should be treated like everyone else. A climactic pep rally showdown has Zed’s kid sister (an odd looking green-haired child) dancing in front of the whole school, prompting a wave of change in the bigots of Seabrook High.
Fido and Warm Bodies cross-pollinated with Disney’s High School Musical series has created this incredibly obvious agenda piece, and with a constant barrage of song and dance numbers and squeaky clean horror tropes (the zombies eat cauliflower mixed with brains), Z-O-M-B-I-E-S emerges as one of the most bizarre movies I’ve seen in awhile. The zombies are profiled as an “other” race, and the movie tries to Disney-fy the issue with cute interracial romance, as it were, but ignores the fact that these zombie kids are D-E-A-D, so I have no idea what happens next in the story. Some 25 years ago, there was a similar type film called My Boyfriend’s Back which made it clear that the zombie boyfriend was deceased, and it dealt with the issues, and then another film came years later called Life After Beth that blew the roof off of the zombie romance subgenre, but Z-O-M-B-I-E-S looks like a board meeting decision come to life. It’s not quite fit for human consumption. From director Paul Hoen.