Lately, mainstream horror movies have focused on the scary
and supernatural, as films like Paranormal Activity and Halloween gathered huge
national and international audiences. Filming a blockbuster horror movie must
be feel repetitive at this point; how many ways can we scare you and how
realistic does the acting have to be to make you feel horrible about it? Zombeavers
belongs to another genre of horror entirely: B horror movies.
There aren’t many truly popular B horror movies. Probably
the most well-known B horror movie director ever, Sam Raimi, isn’t even really
known for his horror movies as much as his Spider-Man films. But there are a
lot of them and they have specific qualities that make them classifiable as B
horror. Calling them B horror is a misnomer anyway, because they’re not really
horrific in any meaningful way. These movies are meant to be funny by appealing
to people’s love of the excess and offensive. They’re not really horror
comedies, like Shaun of the Dead, which was funny, yes, but based its jokes off
of something more lighthearted. B horror encompasses sensibilities that are
more off kilter and low brow, like laughing at someone try a backflip but land
on their neck, except in a B movie, their neck would snap in half and the head
would fall off, rolling away to an unsuspecting toddler who doesn’t understand
what just happened and kicks it like a soccer ball into the net. It’s not JUST
that the head fell off, as many gory, torture porn films would have you believe
is entertaining, but the punchline at the end sets the tone of self-awareness,
that whatever you’re watching is appalling, and everyone knows it, so what are
you going to do about it? I suppose you could classify horror movies that are
just utterly terrible in here too, because they’re unintentionally hilarious
without being scary, and you’d be right. Zombeavers, however, manages to be
both B horror and well-crafted, as well as thoughtful towards its audience.
The movie centers around a group of teenagers as they head
to a cabin in the middle of the woods to partake in some debauchery and resolve
personal issues amongst themselves, standard fare for a horror movie. From
there, things go awry as the teens are attacked by zombie beavers, some get bit
and turn into zombies, leaving fewer and fewer survivors. Replace “zombie
beavers” with “zombies” and it’s a regular zombie movie without anything
interesting attached to it. But add in zombies that are also beavers and you
open yourself up to all sorts of gags that tell the audience, “we know this is
dumb but come see how TRULY dumb it can be.” The movie has a sense of openness
around the premise, with a death scene that involves *SPOILER WARNING* one of
the teens being trapped by the beavers in a beaver dam (!). It’s not slapstick
either, as the actors do a commendable job of playing the straight man in the
face of what looks like stuffed animals come to eat them alive. The premise is
also injected with some witty, clever writing that upends expectations in
several places, including a sunbathing scene that takes an unexpected turn and
a pretty surprising ending.
It’s typical that a film like this has a 4.8 rating on IMDB.
It reminds me of how people regard Freddy vs Jason, one of the funnier
mainstream B horror movies, or how Hollywood realized that Evil Dead 2 was such
a cult hit that they decided to remake the first movie in the vainest, most self-serious
way possible. What made Evil Dead 2 such a classic was that it was the opposite
of serious, so low-budget and over the top that turning it into a run-of-the-mill
scary movie felt so much cheaper than even the original’s production values. Here,
Zombeavers opts to take a more entertaining approach to horror, unafraid to
revel in its stupidity while being intelligent, shameless, and self-deprecating.
And honestly, it’s the reason you go to the movies in the first place: to have
fun.
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