Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse starts by needlessly explaining the source of the film's outbreak. It wastes its opening moments at a lab, where a janitor unwittingly unleashes the first zombie out into the world. This first scene is mostly useful for establishing just how unfunny this movie is going to be. It doesn't actually matter to the plot that this outbreak starts at this lab, but the scene, with its clunky setup and lack of suspense, is indicative of what the rest of the movie turns out to be, minus the puerile humor that comes to define its identity.
Teenagers Ben, Carter and Augie (Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller and Joey Morgan) are scouts. Ben and Carter have been mulling quitting, but have stuck around out of loyalty of Augie, who has really thrown himself into scouting. Carter prods Ben into ditching Augie while camping one night to head to a secret senior party. When they get back to town, however, they find themselves smack dab in the middle of a zombie outbreak. The scouts must use their skills to help save the remaining survivors in town. But before they get to that, they also have to deal with the issues between them.
The film, more than anything else, is a raunchy comedy. The word "comedy" is used here with some hesitation, because very little in this movie is funny at all. What the film lacks in this regard is specificity. It just seems to lump in random nonsense with the occasional brush with something vaguely sexual. It doesn't even try to come up with things that might work within the genre's boundaries. So at one point, a zombie stripper does her routine for the boys, because apparently her need to dance trumps the most basic danger element of the whole genre.
The film is puerile to a frustrating degree. It lets everything else languish in the background, the dumb sex humor taking the fore. So the characters are broadly drawn and generally unlikable. There is a romantic interest that isn't even in the movie for very long. The inner conflict between the three main characters never feels like anything worth caring about. And the zombie threat becomes an amorphous thing. Sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're slow, and sometimes they don't even seem all that dangerous.
The film only really comes alive when it starts getting in gore territory. There are some decent bits of violence in here, if that's what one is into. It isn't very creative, though, and in the climax, a lot of the action is lost to the very tight camera angles. Tye Sheridan is a legitimate young talent who has already worked with the likes of Terence Malick. But given these hack elements, the young actor brings little of the magnetic charm he's brought to other roles. Logan Miller and Joey Morgan certainly seem more comfortable with their roles, but they aren’t really much better.
Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse is not funny. It's not scary. It's not thrilling. It isn't really anything. It feels loosely assembled at best, the film putting on a flimsy impression of an actual movie with a plot and action and jokes. But there is nothing at its core. The film mostly wants to be raunchy, but in a completely juvenile way. It doesn’t leave much room for developed characters or a plot that actually works. It just throws in the random bits of nudity here and there and just calls it a day.
My Rating:
