Zom-Beavers: The Review

Director: Jordan Rubin
Cast: Lexi Atkins, Courtney Palm, Rachel Melvin, Hutch Dano, Rex Linn, Jake Weary, Peter Gilroy
Plot: A dam of beavers is infected with a toxin, turning them into undead rodents, turning their carnage onto a nearby cabin, full of partying teenagers.

Zombeavers is a really frustrating movie. OK, I get the joke that Zombeavers is meant to be a rubbish movie with silly effects, a dumb storyline and cringe-worthy one-liners. However, too many B Movie directors have decided that this means that they don’t even need to try and make a credible movie. Zombeavers fails, because no one even tries to do anything interesting with it.

Isolated cabin? Check. Dumb teenagers? Check. The first twenty minutes being dedicated to the usual teenager antics? Check. The three lead girls are sorority sisters, which is screenwriter talk for ‘anything goes on the slut meter’. See, B Movie by nature are meant to be stupid films, targeted at the movie-goers wanting cheap thrills and quick pay-offs. However, Zombeavers just feels lazy. The characters and locations are stencilled in, little effort going into making them memorable. The male characters are even worse than the women, presented with no likeable features. One girl is suffering from a break-up and her friends totally ignore her distressed situation, even going as far as inviting the boyfriend who cheated on her. Right from that moment, we lose all interest in the characters, watching them make stupid decision after stupid decision. Some of the actors scrape some integrity back, surprisingly the girl asked to play the ‘topless, horny one’, Courtney Palm, earning Star of the Show. Most of the time, the characters are wasted on the audience. The only one we want to see live is the pet dog. This is a shame, because Rachel Melvin’s character actually has some interesting development. If time was spent building on her personality, she would have been the one to watch in this movie. However, because no thought is put into anything, when Melvin’s character does something unexpected, it isn’t a twist, but a case of the writers losing control of the characters.

What about the beavers then? Yeah, they are pretty awful, but that is the big joke. There is something amusing about the characters opening a door and a beaver jumping out at them from the other side. It is quite clearly a puppet, but that shouldn’t be a problem. This movie made me realise that the anticipation to see how scary a movie monster will be and how terrible a movie monster will be are very similar experiences. The beavers should be a source of comedy gold. They are apparently terrifying yet are incredibly slow swimmers. They make growling noises that sound a little like something being kicked in the balls, crossed with an evil chuckle. The look they give their victims when they turn around is priceless. However, this is where the rest of the movie lets the joke down. As I said, Zombeavers is allowed to be a silly movie and we expected funny monsters. However, because Zombeavers messed up everything else, the beavers aren’t ‘purposefully awful’, they are ‘yet another thing the movie cocked up!’ It also hurts that the director doesn’t seem to realise that zombie beavers are funny for a trailer, but if you don’t want that joke wearing thin in the first half hour, you need to do something more with your movie.

And now a paragraph dedicated to just Eric Isaacs: if you want to watch this movie, you need to balance the need to see #BOOBS and the fear of seeing a dick getting the wrong kind of beaver on it. Your call, buddy!

Final Verdict: A few good jokes aside “We can’t fight! It’s what the beavers would want!”, Zombeavers is a lazy, mess of a movie.

One Star