Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse, Film Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 1/10

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller, Joey Morgan, Sarah Dumont, Davis Koechner, Halston Sage, Cloris Leachman, Niki Koss, Hiram A. Murray, Lucas Gage, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Blake Anderson, Missy Martinez.

It’s a shame that American cinema cannot learn from its mistakes, especially when it comes to comedy, parody or irony and if the bench mark in recent times had been set low with Bad Neighbours then it doesn’t really get any better with Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse.

The film may have started with good intentions, the showing of a way of life that has deserted the American social scene and which doesn’t seem to have the same pull on a young lad’s imagination and time as it did in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Yet it soon descends into the worst kind of farce, one that tries so hard to be funny, to be brutally ironic and perhaps even offering a moment of life affirming sincerity into the cinematic mix and yet despite offering so much on paper, cannot find itself a single redeeming feature in which to hold its head aloft as cliché and badly delivered jokes fall flatter than a piano being dropped from a 100 storey building.

The makers of Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse would have done well to watch for example Shaun of the Dead and then realise that such films when made well are genius, they lend themselves to a cultural movement of well scripted and desirable films and not lead themselves to a place where even poorly made British television comedy would descend.

There is a place for the crude and the uninviting, the dreary and the dreadful, film-makers should leave such things to the rank hypocrisy of some British newspapers or even the Governments of the world, not infest the screen with the lame and ugly side of cinema.

Whilst the three main leads, Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller and Joey Morgan, may have hoped to capture something as only a coming of age ritual can, the sloppiness and incredibly bad innuendo on offer, the lack of true comedic homage to a great genre of cinema, can feel nauseating and off putting, a rare feat in the cinematic landscape of 2015.

A film to avoid of possible, if invited to do so, take a small personal D.V.D. player with you and watch any of the Living Dead series; you will get more laughs out of those than at any point of this truly awful film.

Ian D. Hall