Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse is one such film; its characters are so aware they’re in the middle of a zombie movie, they don’t even waste time discussing how the army of ghouls invading their Californian town should be sent back to hell. As soon as the dead start to walk the earth, it’s open season. Scouts Guide’s best scene is its first: a niftily-constructed set-up and pay-off involving a body-popping janitor at a medical research lab, sound-proofed glass and an apparently lifeless corpse. Brilliantly, it’s implied that the entire zombie apocalypse is all the fault of one malfunctioning vending machine. The sequence smartly establishes Scouts Guide’s devil-may-care attitude. Next, we’re introduced to the trio of scouts, who’ve reached that age where wearing a biege uniform covered in badges is rapidly becoming a source of shame. Childhood friends Ben (Mud and Joe actor Tye Sheridan) and Carter (Logan Miller) have agreed to go on a camping expedition in the middle of the woods, guided by their wig-wearing Scout Leader Rogers (the wonderful David Koechner), but only to avoid upsetting their old pal Augie (Joey Morgan) who hasn’t quite reached the age where drinking and partying suddenly seem more interesting than rubbing sticks together to make a fire. While Augie’s preparing for a night under the stars, Ben and Carter plan to sneak off and meet some much cooller school kids for a midnight party – but right on cue, a zombie outbreak throws everybody’s plans through a loop. At any rate, Ben and Carter make friends with Denise (Sarah Dumont), a cocktail waitress who wears short shorts and carries a shotgun. She’s a somewhat two-dimensional yet welcome presence, leading the bickering teens through a ghost-train ride of loosely-connected set-pieces. There’s a likeable chemistry between the leads, but it can’t mask the reality that director and co-writer Christopher Landon’s story falls back a little too readily on genre cliches. It’s easy to guess who’ll become a zombie and who won’t, and there’s a love interest for Ben, Carter’s sister Kendall (Halston Sage) who looks like she’s walked out of a Vogue photo shoot. The horror genre staples carry over to the humour, which is sharp enought to provoke a few laughs but is also familiar from other, classic movies – Re-Animator, in particular, seems to be the source of several gross-out gags. The most surprising thing about Scouts Guide is that it doesn’t do a great deal with its scouting premise. What might have been a kind of zombified Deliverance, with a bunch of kids fending off the undead with sharpened sticks in the middle of a forest clearing or something, soon diverts into more typical urban territory: characters running in terror from raging hordes, backing away from reaching hands, slamming doors just in the nick of time, and so on. Even some of Scouts Guide’s most original ideas aren’t fully followed through; there’s a quite interesting running joke involving zombies and music which is set up but never fully explored. Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse is out in UK cinemas on the 6th November.
