WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Zombeavers

Heard the one about the two guys driving a truck loaded with barrels of toxic waste and they’re so busy talking shit and not paying attention to the road that –

Yeah, Fulwood, we’ve heard it before. Like in the opening scene of ‘Eight Legged Freaks’.

Well, yeah, but with a crucial difference. So listen: there’s these two hillbilly dudes in a truck loaded with barrels of toxic waste and they’re having the mother of all politically incorrect conversations about how dating a guy is easier than dating a woman (“we didn’t disagree about anything, it was real easy – except for the sex: the sex was brutal”) when, as a result of not driving with due care and attention, they hit a deer. The impact jolts a barrel of toxic waste off the back of the truck, whereupon it rolls down into the river and –

FFS, Fulwood, we said we’d heard this one before. The toxic waste infects the water supply causing genetic mutation and zombie-type shenanigans.

Well, yeah, but listen to me, motherfuckers: this toxic waste turns the local beaver population rabid and when you try to fight them off, they prove functionally immortal. These beavers come back from the dead. Because they’re zombie beavers.

They’re …

… zombeavers.

Hey! Hey! Where’s everyone going? Hey! Come back! Aw, c’mon, this kind of no-budget z-grade trash is why you hang out at The Agitation of the Mind and, brother, you know it!

Director Jordan Rubin and his co-scripters Jonathan and Al Kaplan know it, too. Well, not about The Agitation of the Mind, probably. In fact I’d be omigosh surprised if they’d even heard of this blog. But they know exactly what kind of audience they’re catering to and go all out to make exactly the kind of movie you anticipate (gleefully, with an underlying hint of guilt) when you see the title ‘Zombeavers’ on a DVD cover.

Let’s get jiggy with a plot synopsis, shall we? Shortly after the two sexually confused hillbillies lose the barrel of toxic waste, three coed friends (or rather frenemies, given the internal tensions) turn up at a lakeside cabin in rural America for a weekend ostensibly dedicated to helping Jen (Lexi Atkins) get over the heartbreak of her boyfriend cheating on her. Jen’s gal pals are bossy-little-thing Mary (Rachel Melvin) and trash-talking slapper Zoe (Cortney Palm). And if you think I’m being unfair in describing Zoe as a trash-talking slapper, just try spending five minutes’ screentime in her company.

No sooner have they taken to the lake (Zoe indulging in a spot of skinny-dipping) and fallen afoul of the locals than their boyfriends – or at least Mary and Zoe’s boyfriends and Jen’s now thoroughly cold-shouldered ex – turn up without invitation and with booze, partying and sex on their minds. Let’s meet The Three Douches. Jen’s asshole ex-boyfriend is Sam (Hutch Dano), Zoe’s obnoxious boyfriend is Buck (Peter Gilroy), and Mary’s slightly less douchey but still wanker-by-association boyfriend is Tommy (Jake Weary, who alone amongst the cast can actually claim a legimate film career on account of having been in ‘It Follows’*).

Buck and Tommy get their end away that night. Sam gets Jen’s kneecap in his gonads. Jen is startled in the bathroom by an aggressive beaver, which the guys dispatch with a baseball bat after some debate about who should tackle the creature. None acquit themselves as paragons of knight-in-shining-armour type behaviour. Next day, the sextet are at the lake when the zombeavers attack. Although Buck sustains injury, the group make it back to the cabin. The zombeavers lay siege. It’s the most pathetic siege in the history of horror cinema:

What follows is pretty much as you’d expect from a zombie film: foiled escape attempts, massively amplified internal tensions, gruesome deaths and the inability to get a mobile signal or find a functional landline (the visual punchline of zombeaver prints next to the severed cable is a nice touch). The drama around Sam’s dalliance behind Jen’s back is also resolved, and it’s touching to see that such a trashy outing as ‘Zombeavers’ can actually make time for its characters’ emotional closure before getting down to the business of their mortal closure. Hey folks, I’m kidding; the Sam/Jen thing merely allows for a bit of padding so that a short-as-it-is-anyway movie can just about clear the bar re: feature length.

Does it do anything unexpected, or anything new with the genre? Does it rug-pull with expectations or monkey with the formula? No, of course it fucking doesn’t! It’s a film called ‘Zombeavers’ – did you really expect it to be a game-changer?** It has zombie beavers and it makes no bones about the fact that they’re puppets (seriously: if Jim Henson had got fucked up on peyote and decided to make a movie that wasn’t for the kiddies, he’d have come up with exactly these furry-toothy-undead critters). It has a cast of college kids (albeit played by actors in their late twenties), so it features douchey behaviour and nudity. It’s a zombie movie, so people get chomped and/or eviscerated. Oh, and you know how the rules stipulate that those who are bitten become zombies themselves? Well, what do you think happens to people who are bitten by zombeavers?

You’re shaking your head now, aren’t you? Facepalming? Mumbling something along the lines of “oh, for the love of all things unholy, please tell me the filmmakers don’t actually go there”?

They go there. Of course they go there. This is a film called ‘Zombeavers’. Why would they not?



*Though I’ll be perfectly honest in admitting that I found ‘Zombeavers’ a far more rewarding film than ‘It Follows’.

**Although the closing credits song arguably is. It’s a brilliant piece of camp which recaps the entire narrative in the form of a Sinatra-esque swing number. Sample lyric: “Contaminated by toxic goo / A genetic mistake / They’re semi-aquatic, they’re hungry for you / Boys and girls, stay away from the lake”. Sample lyric #2: “Look out, they’re coming through the walls / Your girlfriend’s chewing off your balls / Zombeeeeeeeeavers!”).

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #3: It Follows

There was one of those storm-in-a-teacup kerfuffles on social media recently when Quentin Tarantino said of David Robert Mitchell’s sophomore feature ‘It Follows’ that “it’s one of those movies that’s so good that you start getting mad at it for not being great”. QT went on to enumerate some of the issues, his main gripe being that Mitchell was inconsistent as regards the film’s mythology. There are those who took umbrage at Tarantino’s opinionism. Personally, I think he was being charitable.

The basic concept of ‘It Follows’ is that there’s a curse, or a haunting, or something (Mitchell’s savvy enough not to get bogged down in exposition) that is passed on through sexual encounters. Once you’ve received it, you become aware of people – they might be male or female, strangers or family members, they might appear to be alive or bear the disfigurements of death – following you relentlessly; unstoppably. If they catch up with you, it’s goodnight Vienna. The only way to break the curse, or dispel the haunting, or whatever is to have sex with someone else. Only that doesn’t entirely guarantee you a “get out of being killed” waiver. If the individual you’ve passed it onto doesn’t get rid of it by the same means before the follower catches up with them – if, in other words, they’re killed – the curse, or haunting, or summat starts working its way back down the chain.

Which, admittedly, is a pretty good concept. Particularly the idea of the follower doing a u-turn and working its way back. Thread this through an acutely observed picture of teenagers on the cusp of discovering their sexual identities and dealing with the accompanying emotional rollercoaster, and – pace Tarantino – there was no reason for this not to be something special. The problems start with the very first shot …

… which looks for all the world like a screengrab from John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’. And for the next hour and a half Mitchell only pauses in his wholesale plundering of Carpenter’s seasonal classic in order to nick a few other bits from David Lynch. Even the music (by Disasterpiece) is a film-long riff on the ‘Halloween’ soundtrack except in one place where it throws in an homage to Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ (‘The Exorcist’) and a few others where the order of the day is some discordant atonality a la ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’.

The problems continue with the very first line of dialogue and continue through to the last. Not the dialogue itself, I hasten to add – Mitchell often gives his teenagers interesting and thoughtful things to say, and allows that some teens will have read T.S. Eliot and Dostoyevsky and not everyone under the age of twenty-five has to act like a douchebag – but the sound recording. The music is intrusive, the foley only slightly less so, and the dialogue is often helplessly lost in the mix. I had to replay a few scenes, and some others I gave up on.

The performances are variable: as protagonist Jay, Maika Monroe has a winsome and haunted look about her that suits the narrative, but she sleepwalks much of the film. Lili Sepe as her sister Kelly and Olivia Luccardi as their friend Yara seem more at home with their characters, but are given very little to work with. Keir Gilchrist and Daniel Zovatto, as romantic rivals over Jay, create just enough by way of characterization to keep themselves afloat. Only Jake Weary as Hugh, the love rat who gives Jay the curse/haunting/whatever actually invests himself in a performance and goes for broke: the scene where the gang confront him and he sweatily tries to justify himself, warn Jay to pass it on, and absent himself before anything nasty happens (all within the space of a couple of minutes) is the best-acted moment in the movie, Weary single handedly creating a dynamic and a sense of urgency.

Elsewhere, the characters veer between acting like normal (if utterly unnerved and bemused) teenagers, then doing stupid character-in-a-horror-movie things purely because the script needs them to. There are other moments that are just plain awkward, such as Jay driving as far as she can in an attempt to escape her follower, then having to stop and get some sleep. Now, you’re being pursued by something weird and unstoppable; you’re driving a car; you just can’t keep going. Do you: (a) find somewhere off the road and out of sight, trigger the internal locking system, slide the front seats forward and huddle into the backseat footwell, hoping no-one will see you should they happen across the vehicle; or (b) stop the car right on the edge of the road, get out, curl up on the bonnet and go to sleep? It’s (a), isn’t it? Every time. Mais non! Jay, who has hitherto made very well-considered decisions, opts for (b), a course of action guaranteed to see you robbed, possibly assaulted and your car absconded with, and that’s quite without any supernatural threat! 

Ultimately it’s this unholy trinity – too many borrowings from other directors’ work (which is fine if, like Tarantino, you fashion them into your own authorial style); inconsistency in the film’s internal logic; and ostensibly smart characters suddenly and pointlessly doing stupid things – that work against the film. ‘It Follows’ has a lot of promise and some intensely memorable moments – an opening scene spatially dislocated by a dizzying and entirely unexpected 360° pan; an exploring-an-abandoned-house sequence that builds its menace from social realism and avoids the obvious scaremongering; a beachside idyll that explodes into supernatural horror – and there’s enough to suggest that once Mitchell develops his own filmmaking style he’ll be a force to be reckoned with. But its weaknesses stack up mightily, particularly its puppyish obsession with mimicking ‘Halloween’. ‘It Follows’ isn’t bad – it isn’t bad at all – but it’s still the work of a beginner. To continually call to mind and allow itself to be judged against ‘Halloween’ – the work of a master – is a huge aesthetic miscalculation.