Zombeavers is a 2014 horror/comedy about a fun weekend that turns into madness and horror for a bunch of groupies looking for fun in a beaver infested swamp.
As men who transport volatile chemicals are legally and contractually bound to be in movies, the men transporting volatile chemicals in this movie are in fact, idiots. Traveling on a country road with a payload of toxic-filled canisters, the two engage in intellectually stimulating conversations about bathroom etiquette in another person’s bathroom and the rules there in. The driver is on his cell phone of course and his sidekick casually asks if he sees that there is a deer in the road. He says he does, but actually doesn’t. It splatters like an egg against the truck’s front end, giving the movie its first ewey-gooey guts and yuck moment. It also jostles a toxic canister loose because . . . scriptwriter physics! It rolls off the truck, down an embankment and into the nearby river where it floats through rapids and rocks until settling next to a beaver dam where it promptly bursts and fires neon green gunk everywhere. Will the poison kill said beavers and mercifully end this movie before it starts? Not a chance.
Meanwhile, three lean and leggy college girls are on their way up to the lake for a weekend away from their busy college lives that includes texting and boys, and texting to boys. Mary, Zoe, and Jenn want to have some fun, but right away, Zoe and Jenn are upset because there is no cell phone coverage, which these days amounts to the same level of panic as no more food. Or worse. Mary tries to convince them to just enjoy the two days together but honestly, you don’t really care about this paragraph and have probably already skipped ahead to the picture of the lovely Courtney Palm in her tiny red bikini, so I could pretty much talk about anything here and no one would even know, such as how I think there are too many blueberries in the blueberry muffins I buy at this corner coffee shop near my house. I mean, I really like blueberries and the muffins there are really delicious, but it’s like every bite is so full of blueberries that I sometimes get an overload of them and it’s just like I kind of think that blueberries are meant to be the “surprise” in the bite not the total taste so after a while it’s just, meh, I’m eating blueberries.
The girls end up sunbathing on a wooden raft that is not far from shore but surprisingly close to a beaver dam. Go figure. While every college aged girl in a boob-centric horror movie I ever saw would have about as much interest in a beaver dam as they would in say, abstinence, the three are right away intrigued by the dam and Jenn convinces them to swim on over and check it. So they swim on over and check it out. Time for more bikinis!
They see the beaver lodge and the dam and notice they are covered in a bright green neon gunk and immediately surmise that it’s beaver piss because . . . well, you know, who cares why? The title of the movie is Zombeavers. These lovely ladies are not here for exposition. Toplessness, yes. Exposition, no. So let’s move on. Just then a bear shows up. No kidding. The girls casually comment that they are scared but then a shotgun blast echoes and the bear walks away. Damn. Zombears would be cool, too. Oh wait. That happens. Anyway, in walks one of the bad guys from Cliffhanger! You remember Cliffhanger, right? Oh man, it’s this crazy action flick with Sylvester Stallone and John Lithgow where mountain rescuers square off against a mad man who’s plane crashes in the snowy peaks and there’s all this money involved and Rocky, well not Rocky but the guy who plays Rocky . . . wait, you did see Rocky, right? What was I saying? Oh yeah. The Cliffhanger guy shows up. And he also doesn’t notice the green neon not-beaver-piss gunk either because, well, girls:
Let’s get to the Zombeavers. By this point, they’ve already munched (unseen) on their first victim, a young man fishing on the shore before the girl’s arrived. All that’s left of him is his cap floating past the raft. That leaves only the three girls as the entree. Or so it would seem. Luckily for the undead buck-tooth rodents, more morsels arrive. It turns out the girl’s boyfriends think that when Mary had told them, “we want to spend the weekend alone” is was actually code for, “come on up and be douche-bags”. And so they do and are. Let the sexing begin! The boys, existing entirely on the premise that females are meant only to, as one dreamboat says, “wake up his sleeping dick” go straight to bedding their girlfriend’s, except Jenn who is angry with her cheating beau so they sit on the sofa and obligatorily look up at the ceiling and listen to the atomic pounding going on above them where another boy-wonder claims he, “feels like a Power Ranger.” I’m guessing not the Pink one. Either way, Jess decides to take a shower after kneeing her horny cheating boyfriend in the happy sack and strips down to her undies and opens the shower curtain to reveal, at last, ladies and gentleman, the moment we’ve been waiting for, a full on, in the fur, one-hundred percent real and not a puppet zombeaver.
Now things get icky. And even more schlocky. And gory. And stupid. And whatever. They straight up murder that beaver with a baseball bat, and yes, it does come back to life later on, so hooray, it is a zombie beaver. The kids don’t know that though and start the day off right by taking a dip in the lake and sunbathing on the raft. It’s not long before the zombeavers do what zombeavers do, which sadly, is not build a house of the dead though that really should be. Instead, they bite things. Ferociously. First up, douche-bag boyfriend number two, Buck.
They chomp off this fella’s foot and then feast on the pet dog. That’s just wrong. Not only are the undead beavers mean and gnarly, but also rather smart for undead beavers. Having the forethought to think their victims might try and call the authorities, they chew up the phone lines. They also hunt in packs and coordinate attacks. These are some exceptional beavers. And I’ve seen some exceptional beavers in my day. Stop it. I meant at the nature preserve in my hometown. But yes, the other one, too.
Directed by Jordan Rubin, Zombeavers never tries to be serious and truly knows exactly what it intends to be. But that’s also the problem. The title is the whole show and it’s just a matter of wrapping a 77-minute eternity, er I mean story around it from there. That “story” is about as complex as the directions for making toast, but it does cleverly take the cabin in the woods trope and well, do nothing with the cabin in the woods trope other than make beaver/vagina jokes and replace serial killer with toothy rodents so no, not so clever. The opening scene with the two losers in the transport truck are played by the talented Bill Burr and believe it not, singer-songwriter John Mayer in a dreadful meth-head wig and promises something it never delivers, and the movie just can’t outsmart its own clever name. With a frat boy mentality from start to finish, the comedy is never really funny, the scares are never really scary and the girls are never, well . . . okay the girls are always really sexy, but why couldn’t they be more? With the men (a loose term at best) obsessed either with fighting beavers are trying to get inside one, the weight of the entire film’s conceit lies solely with the ladies and unfortunately this was written by people who either made a conscious choice to treat women like one-dimensional characters or apparently never had a conversation with a real girl before. I could go on, but there’s little point. There are so many better options for zombie/horror and teenagers in peril movies, but if you’re looking for a film that features aggressive beavers, and I mean the ones with four legs and a flat tail not the ones at that biker bar I accidentally strolled into that one time, then this is your movie.
That Moment In Zombeavers
So a good chunk of the movie has gone by and we’ve seen the zombeavers chomp their way about the cabin, giving everyone a fright, except for the people watching. Three of them try to make a run for it and get help by taking a pick-up truck parked nearby, but those pesky rodents fell a few trees and block the road. Also one of the boys also gets himself killed by a tree because honestly, how could he have ever noticed that a tree was falling on him? It’s impossible. (Sarcasm score=750! A new high!) The other two get rescued by the Cliffhanger guy and they take refuge in a house not far from where the beavers are attacking except, whoops, the beavers have already attacked the house and the people inside are bloody corpses. Meanwhile, back at the cabin, Mary and Jenn and her cheating boyfriend are trapped inside and trying to think of a way to survive. We learn that Mary is actually the one that Jenn’s boyfriend had the affair with, and if you can figure out why Mary, Jenn or any girl on the planet would do anything with this creep, then enter our latest contest: Why Would Mary Or Jenn Or Any Girl On The Planet Do Anything With This Creep for a chance to win a brand new, 2015 limited edition, hand crafted Thank You For Playing reply from That Moment In! It’s what all the popular people are asking for! Enter your theories in the comment section below!
Okay, time for the moment. Earlier, poor Jenn got scratched by a zombeaver while fighting it off in the kitchen (The crotch shot above). Seemed inconsequentially at the time but that night, after Mary confesses her sorrow for cheating with Sam to Jenn, Jenn decides to visit Mary in the bedroom and for a short time, things in zombeavers looked to get a whole lot more, well, beavery.
Turns out, no. In fact, this is the surprise “twist” in the movie that is as “surprise-y” and “twist-y” as a Number 2 pencil. Or any number pencil in fact. (It’s not twisty is what I’m saying). See, once you get a bit of that zombeaver juice in you, either by bite or by scratch, you’re gonna be a zombie. And not just any kind of zombie. No. A full on beaver zombie. Buck teeth, a tail (yes, a tail!), and all. Bet you didn’t see that coming? Oh right. You totally saw that coming.
Even still, it is the best (?) part of the movie, just for its total commitment to the premise. But that’s not saying much. By no means would anyone watching this think that it’s going to be only about a bunch of rodents doing all the gnashing. In fact dogs and a bear get in on the action as well (briefly. For 1.3 seconds in fact). There is no attempt at continuity or any semblance of logic in how or why or even when a person can change once bitten, so while watching, it’s as good a guess as any as to when a victim is going to suddenly lurch up and go on a spree, but it’s usually right when someone in the movie least expects it but when we totally expect it so *yawn*. But at least here, when the pretty Jenn is climbing onto the bed with the pretty Mary, it is its most effective. Jenn had been set up as the real protagonist, the horror film cliche “final girl” and since she never goes nude, is distrustful of boys and suspects trouble well before the others, we automatically assume she is the one that is going to make it to the end. In fact, for a moment, it might even be expected that Mary will become the zombie as the scene starts. So hooray, zombeavers, you almost . . . almost . . . did something more clever than your title. Instead, it shifts away from Jenn and then simply can’t decide who to follow and becomes just a mash up of biting and chewing and sprays of crimson colored goo. There’s also an odd line harkening back to Die Hard for some reason when Douche-bag boyfriend Number 3 says “come to the lake, have a few laughs” that fits into this film as well as Al Pacino in an Adam Sandler movie about twins does, which is to say not at all.
And that bring us to the end. (I’d put a *spoiler* warning here, but let’s be honest, are you really going to watch this movie?)
The real final girl is Zoe. You remember her, right?
She manages to make it out of beaver hell and gets onto the main road, bloodied and limping, the only survivor of the entire ordeal. And guess who’s coming down the road, heading straight for her. It’s our rocket scientist friends driving the toxic chemical transport truck. The sidekick asks the driver if he sees the girl in the road. He says he does but, well, you can guess. It’s a silly and maddening ending to a rather unimaginative and charmless film that had a truckload of potential but squanders it all on lame jokes, stock characters and a utterly lifeless story. I could say dam let’s lodge a complaint about this beaver movie but I think puns at this point aren’t going to save anything. Besides, you’ve already stopped reading and scrolled up to the girls in bikinis again anyway. I think I will, too.