Main cast: Ione Butler (Leslie Hogan), Andrew Asper (Gage), Kim Nielsen (Dr Ellen Rogers), LaLa Nestor (Thea), Marcus Anderson (Rex). Brianna Chomer (Amber), Aaron Groben (AJ). Kaiwi Lyman-Mersereau (Daxton), Isaac Anderson (Ricky), and Tammy Klein (Chelsea)
Director: Glenn R Miller
Oh my god, you may be thinking, why are there so many reviews of crappy movies these days? Well, people, when I took a break about a week ago, I saw many… interesting… things and of course I can only share what I saw with everyone. So, today we have Zoombies. That’s “zoo” and “zombies” stuck together, although the zombies here are more like creatures infected by some ill-defined virus or germ or whatever. Me, I am simple. Tell me that there are killer animals on the loose and I want to watch as they lay down the law of nature on hapless humans.
Oh, that’s right. This is a movie from The Asylum. The animals here are obviously actual, tame animals given some dodgy fuzzy evil-face effects in post-production, puppets and stuffed toys, or very fake-looking CGI completely recreated by Al the intern.
Anyway, we head on over to Eden Wildlife Zoo, described by the manager and founder Dr Ellen Rogers as a sanctuary for endangered animals from all over the world. I’m a bit confused by the movie showing me a newspaper clipping about how Ellen’s grandfather opened the zoo fifty years ago, but apparently this Eden is only about to be opened to the public soon. Maybe she refurbished and renovated the whole thing recently, I guess.
When this movie opens, Ellen’s staff welcomes a bunch of “college” interns. That’s “college” because some of these “kids” look like they are in their thirties at the very least. The ones that have the most screen time are the annoying and whiny Gage and the bratty and spoiled Amber, so there’s that. Leslie Hogan is the new member of the security team, and she is given lines and scenes to mark her clearly as one of the final survivors that they may as well have her wear a T-shirt that says “Heroine!”. Oh, and there’s Ellen’s brat Thea, who is in the movie because her babysitter can’t make it. What are the odds of a child getting killed in a movie made in the 2000s again? Also, there must be a discount sale going on at some male Asian actor expo nearby, I guess, because there are four or five Asian guys here, which must be a new record. Don’t worry—they all die off after a scene or two, hence restoring the status quo.
What happens is that the veterinarians here use an unauthorized medication on a monkey that is having a heart attack, and the next thing these idiots know, they are dead and the “zoombie” monkey starts to infect other animals in the area. Infected animals, even giraffes, turn into violent murderous things and soon, there is a carnage festival that rivals Jurassic Park (which is name-dropped here in case the rip-offs are too subtle for me to catch)… ha, ha, I wish.
The story actually has potential, and in the hands of the right people with the right amount of money, this one could have been a joy to behold. Unfortunately, with it being what it is, the whole thing resembles a zoo-themed live action adaptation of a session of The Sims managed by a sadistic kid that just wants to kill all the people in the neighborhood. Some of the animals, especially the parrots, certainly look like they belong to The Sims 2. There are plenty of unintentionally hilarious scenes, such as when someone is being attacked by an infected creature in a scene where the CGI’ed creature is nowhere in the right angle to physically touch the screaming character, or my favorite, when the main cast just stand there as giraffes rip an Asian dude to pieces, only to then galvanize into action when the giraffes attack the screaming white girl next. Racists, all of them!
The acting is terrible—really, this is at the level of The Sims, the one that came out in 2004—and most of the cast are one-line, one-scene wonders at best. The ones that are clearly earmarked to survive for most of the movie are given sarcastic lines to be uttered at the worst moments, because the bad CGI isn’t immersion-breaking enough and these people want to go all out. Seriously, the characters in The Sims 2 have more passion and life in their delivery of their lines. Everyone here just acts and speaks like they are as alive as the CGIs they are forced to pretend they are sharing their scenes with. Oh, and the child actress is terrible, but that’s kind of to be expected for horror films. The biggest casting misstep of this movie, though, is Gage. This “college intern” is played by a noticeably much older guy who is also losing his hair, and that character is so inconsistently written that he swings from being a whiny and useless turd to being a halfway competent twat and back again without much rhyme or reason.
I also don’t know how people who have never held a gun before can end up being such perfect shots in this movie, but by that point, I’m beyond questioning these things. I have seen giraffes eat people, and after that scene, I stop asking why.
The biggest failure of this movie, however, is how it just gives up as it lumbers towards its finish line. Is it because they ran out of money? At any rate, they build up this infected gorilla as the biggest threat of them all, and by the end, I finally get the much anticipated confrontation… and then, that’s it. Seriously, the infected koala bear is more memorable than this failure of a big threat, because the final confrontation is over within a few minutes. Maybe the crew finally goes on a strike because there is no money for catering and they are really hungry, thus forcing the movie to come to an abrupt closure?
Mind you, the concept behind the movie and some of the murderous moments here are pretty cool. Really, with a bigger budget and better production values, this one may work. As it is, though, Zoombies is just a potentially cool movie totally botched by these The Asylum people doing what they normally do for quick and easy money.
