Release Date: March 20, 2015 (Limited and VOD)
Director: Jordan Rubin
MPAA Rating: R
With a title like Zombeavers, there’s a certain lowered expectation associated with watching this kind of film, much like other purposefully campy creature features, such as Piranha 3D or Big Ass Spider. Indeed Jordan Rubin’s film is a silly gorefest, featuring giant, mutated versions of nature’s cute little rodent builders, but the fun takes a bit too long to get started.
The film begins as most monster movies do, with John Mayer and Bill Burr splattering a deer on the highway, causing a barrel of toxic waste to fall off their truck and land next to a beaver dam turning them into ravenous zombies. A group of twenty-something assholes on vacation at a nearby lake house become the targets of said beavers, and horror and laughter ensues.
Although the film doesn’t waste too much time diving into the craziness of the zombie beavers, the downtime that’s spent with the central cast of characters is a truly grating experience, causing me to long for their inevitable demise. This was certainly an intentional decision – as most of these horror/comedies like to play with extremes, making the viewer almost want to side with the monster – but that doesn’t make these people any less annoying. With their perpetual horniness, bad Southern accents and insistence on wearing a beanie even while swimming in a lake, these characters are just awful.
Until the third act ramps up everything to a new level, Zombeavers plays out like a typical creature film, with the beavers utilizing their various dam-building skills to systematically dispatch the hapless millennials. While this doesn’t prove to be anything special, things begin to get interesting when those who received bites or scratches from the beavers begin to transform into beavers themselves. This adds a new dynamic to an otherwise by-the-numbers horror/comedy.
The comedic elements in Zombeavers didn’t work for me and the movie itself had a bit of a mean streak that I didn’t find humorous, but it wasn’t anything offensively dumb like in Piranha 3DD or Sharknado. The concept of zombie beavers alone is enough to give the movie a look, but don’t expect a laugh riot. The funniest moment for me was actually one of the outtakes at the end of the film in which John Mayer talks about getting apple turnovers from Arby’s.
Zombeavers is everything you would expect from a movie called Zombeavers. It’s not good; it’s not trying to be good; and I’m totally fine with that. I do wish it deviated from the more formulaic aspects of the recent batch of horror/comedies and gave us some more tolerable characters, but it was the off-the-rails finale that saved this one for me. If you want to have a cheesy, ridiculous movie-watching experience, Zombeavers is worth a look.
