Dead cats, undead breasts, and weed whackers: ‘Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse’

zombie

“Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” comes damn close to perfectly blending gross-out humor, teen sex comedies and jump-scare laden horror.

It is also considered a bomb on several review aggregate sites, currently sitting at a rotten 33 percent on RottenTomatoes.com.

For once I severely disagree with the critics at large. “Scouts Guide” is the second movie to make me genuinely laugh this semester (the other being “American Ultra”).

The film follows three high school sophomores who are Scouts, a generic approximation of the real-world Boy Scouts of America. Members Ben (Tye Sheridan), Augie (Joey Morgan) and Carter (Logan Miller) leave their campsite to discover the apocalypse has struck their town. With the help of gun-toting cocktail waitress Denise (Sarah Dumont), the scouts use their survival knowledge to defend themselves against the undead.

A huge boon for this movie is its casting. Unlike most films with younger main characters, such as last month’s “Goosebumps,” “Scouts Guide” chose actors who actually can pass for being 17 years old.

For a zombie film, “Scouts Guide” adds little to the genre. You’ve got your basic slow-moving walkers akin to what you’d see in “Night of the Living Dead.” The key difference here is the zombies in “Scouts Guide” retain memories of their previous life. Throughout the film zombies repeat normal everyday actions, opening doors and operating basic machines. One even uses a trampoline. This was a fresh touch that opened up some wonderful little comedic moments.

Gags are appropriately spaced out so the audience has time to forget how over-the-top the movie actually can be. It’s not the classiest humor in the world, but it slots in perfectly with a zombie movie. This film is probably the first to properly use gross-out humor since the market was flooded with them after 2007’s  “Superbad.”

“Scouts Guide” walks that fine line where a joke is both funny and also uncomfortable enough to make a viewer squirm in their seat. It’s not the most creative or revolutionary film, but it retreads old ground in a refreshing and hilarious way.  

Of course, I’d advise taking this with a grain of salt, considering this is film advice from a man who laughed for five minutes as a “Scouts Guide” character was suspended over a crowd of bloodthirsty zombies, his only handhold being a dead, old man’s penis.