Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. Horribly reviewed when it came out in 2015. 44% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audience score isn't much better. I fucking loved it. 10 out of 10. These people don't know what the fuck they are talking about. It had me LOLing which doesn't happen often. It's got everything. Gore. Yucks. Zombies. Strippers. Zombie strippers. Like I said, everything. It is the greatest movie of all time.
Pros: Humorous. Mostly solid practical effects. Manage to do a lot with little. The kids and the stripper: super solid. If you like this type of comedy horror flick, then it is nearly perfect.
Cons: Sure, it's kind of juvenile, but what do you expect?
Here's the gist. A camping trip gets cut short for a trio of boy scouts when zombies take over their town. With the help of a local stripper, the boys with their ingenuity save their "cooler" classmates who are at a rave getting crunk. The movie stars Logan Miller (Carter) from
Love, Simon (never heard of it), Joey Morgan (Augie) whom I've never seen, and Tye Sheridan (Ben) who is the lead from
Ready Player One, as the scouts. The film was directed by Christopher B. Landon, son of the late Michael Landon of
Little House on the Prairie and
Highway to Heaven fame, who previous directed
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones and has since done the flick
Happy Death Day which I loved. Landon, in my opinion, is a rising star whose career I will definitely follow closely. Also appearing in the movie are Blake Anderson aka the frizzy haired guy in
Workaholics, Sarah Dumont as the stripper (not to be confused with the zombie stripper), David Koechner (Champ from
Anchorman) as the scout leader, Halston Sage (Kendall: sister of Carter, crush of Ben) who was the love interest of the two main frat bros in
Neighbors, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's kid Patrick as the dick boyfriend of Sage's character.
The movie draws you in quick with the Workaholics dude working as a janitor in a hospital. He goes to a quarantined area while the doctor leaves to get a snack from a machine. There, alone, going where he shouldn't, dude thinks he kills the zombie patient zero and attempts CPR which smashes his rib cage. This wakes the zombie up and they go at it. You can see him flying around behind the doctor's back who can't hear him through the sound proof windows. Dude eventually comes back and eats the doctor who has his hand up the vending machine that just ate his dollar and his snack. Ok. I'm in at this point.
We see pretty early on that these are the
Dawn of the Dead zombies that still go through the motions of being alive and doing what they did in life. In that movie we saw them head to the mall in droves. Here we see the scoutmaster returning home from the woods and a stripper doing her whole routine including a disgustingly gory and extremely hot (kidding) pole dance. We also get some honking of a big tittied cop zombie that loses her shirt on a fence.
Favorite scene is sort of a tough one. The opening is great, as is the strip club sequence, as well as the ending. Ultimately, it's one where the trio, now accompanied by the lone surviving stripper, head to Carter's house to find his sister's diary to find out where the big party is going down. While there in the sister's upstairs bedroom, Ben ends up confessing to the stripper that he has a crush on Carter's sister, Kendall, and how he is nervous or about making a move or whatever. The stripper, though, is like "you just need some practice," and they start making out. It is a weird turn, for sure, but while that is going on, you sort of notice something in the background: a zombie jumping on a trampoline just behind them. Once shit goes down and they all have to flee, they end up using the trampoline to clear the wall into a neighbor's yard. All of them bloop down from the window and boing over the wall no problem until they get to Ben who sees the diary they are looking for. In the time it takes to grab it though the trampoline become overrun with bouncing zombies. He grabs onto the only thing he can which we see is a zombie in a robe's dick, much to his horror. My female companion laughed nonstop like a wild woman the whole time that was going down, which seemed like too long.
Best kill, in my opinion, comes when the old cat lady that lives next door, wanders over and attacks Carter. She attacks him by pulling his past down and biting his ass but doesn't have her teeth in so just keeps gumming him. It is gross but hilarious. He ends up turning the tables on her though and smashes the window and slams it down on her neck, decapitating her. It is sick. Her cats attempt to avenge her though as they have all turned to zombies that look and act just like hobgoblins from one of the best MST3K riffs,
Hobgoblins.
MVP of the movie, for me, has to be Landon as this is the second of his films I have seen that are totally my type of flick. He's on a list of newer directors (along with Jeremy Saulnier and Ti West) whose shit I will eagerly anticipate. Having previously wrote those Paranormal Activity movies (which were meh), dude wanted to do something more upbeat with a bit of humor which is more in line with his personality and sensibilities. "I'm kind of a goofy dude and so this felt very much like a reflection of my personality and the stuff that I grew up watching. When I read the first script, I was like, 'Wow, I can actually make a gory R-rated version of
The Goonies and
Gremlins or even
Monster Squad,' and so that was the big appeal for me." Yeah, I think we should totally hang out. MVP for sure.
Overall, the movie is fun as hell and has a kick ass ending. They basically get to the dance and use all of the ingenuity they learned scouting to build killing machines that they use to great effect. The carnage is gnarly and extreme and they come out to "Rock You Like a Hurricane." Shit is dope.
