Lousy Lottery 32: No Cage Can Hold these Zoombies!
Welcome, friends, to the Lousy Lottery! Here’s how it works. First, I post four movies to a poll on Twitter. Fans vote to pick which movie to make me watch that week. I watch it, review it and spread the word about an amazingly awful, terribly terrific b-horror flick.
This is week 32! Last week we narrowly escaped the jaws of a shark. This week we find ourselves facing even more critter violence with 2016’s Zoombies! But first, let’s talk plot.
There’s a new zoo in town and it’s not like others you’ve visited. Oh no, this zoo is filled only with endangered animals. This could’ve lead to some very real terror about losing said animals later, but, well, it wasn’t really acted or written well enough for all that gravitas. Anyway, it’s a zoo of nothing but endangered animals and I truly can’t imagine the red tape required to pull such a feat off. Somehow, Dr. Rogers pulled it off and the zoo is almost ready to open to the public. Dr. Rogers is the head of Eden Zoo and today is the day when all the interns arrive for training.
One stereotype after another arrives at the zoo for training. You’ve got your jock, your frat boy, your drunken party girl, they’re all here! Animals are also arriving and one monkey seems sick. The vet, determined not to let this monkey die, injects said monkey with some sort of black market adrenaline that he, for some reason, had at the ready. It seems whatever that green shit was did more than wake the monkey back up. It made the monkey go bananas! Alright, sorry, but seriously, the monkey seems to have come back to life as a blood thirsty zombie and rips the eyeballs right out of one of the veterinarian’s eye sockets.
Then it bites the other monkeys in the room and like any good zombie story, the infection spreads. That first, injecting vet bars the door to keep any of them from escaping, which works well until the tour of new interns makes it to the lab and opens the goddamn door. They get out and all hell breaks loose. At first the mission is to protect the animals and figure out what’s going on. They agree not to call the police. The director must’ve forgotten that part, because Dr. Rogers promptly calls the police. In a shocking display of appropriate behavior, the cops show up with choppers, SWAT teams and weapons galore. They send one team into a storage area, get attacked by a lion and there are no police in the remainder of the movie.
Then the mission becomes less about protecting the animals and finding out what’s going on and simply surviving. One by one the interns and staff are picked off by animals who are computer generated with late-90’s Netscape level quality graphics. As many interns and staff as possible make it to a building to shelter there and ride it out. In that building, we get one of the best kills of the movie, when Dr. Rogers’ daughter beats a koala to death with a bat. It was funny and bloody and the movie’s best moment. While there, the team suddenly realizes the biggest problem is the aviary. If those birds get infected and get out, the whole world could be toast.
So, now the mission becomes stopping that from happening. There is one staff member and one intern in the aviary, but they really don’t have a way of communicating with them. It’s up to them to brave the zoo and make it from the office building they’re hunkered down in to the aviary. Not all of them make it and it’s quite a battle against everything from infected CGI snakes to infected CGI giraffes. They make it, but realize they are too late. The birds are already infected and the workers are dead. In what feels like a throwback to action movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s, Dr. Rogers pours a little gasoline outside the aviary and then dribbles a line away from it. When she lights the gas, the aviary explodes. And scene.
Somehow, someone at SyFy decided to really push these kinds of off-the-wall, bad CGI-laden creature features that feel like throwbacks to the midnight movies of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Out of nowhere, these movies were coming out all but quarterly and, all of a sudden, it’s like an entire era of the subgenre was reborn simply because one studio decided to go all in. They use many of the same plots, the same production locations and the same production teams. The director of this movie, Zoombies, Glenn Miller, also worked in various roles on many of them, including Toxic Shark, 2 Lava 2 Lantula and Santa Claws. In the course of just two to three years, SyFy pumped these movies out!
So, what sort of movie comes from directors and writers who make movies like Hoodrat 2: Hoodrat Warriors? Well, they’re formulaic, poorly acted, poorly written, poorly produced and a heaping tablespoon of fun. These are the sorts of movies you’d see at midnight screenings in some one-screen theatre in downtown or at some drive-in theatre. They’re the sort of movies called b-movies or schlock or trash. While the SyFy movies lack in much of the nudity rampant in the b-movies of old, they certainly share the love of cheesy overacting and big gore that leads to a lot of laughs paired with eye rolls and head shakes.
If you’re looking for something that will impact your worldview or help shape who you are as a person, it’s super unlikely you’ll find what you’re looking for here. However, if what you’re after is a fun time, Zoombies has your back. It’s the sort of movie that pairs well with a cold beer, a hot pizza and some dank weed. It’s a movie meant to be watched, loved and mocked with friends. I once went to a burlesque show in Vegas wherein a woman dressed in a gorilla costume shimmied and stripped to Nine Inch Nail’s Closer. Was it fun? Hell yeah it was. Did it move my soul? Uh, no, but they did serve absinthe and that paired very well with it.
I guess my point is this. Do you go to see a movie called Zoombies because you’re looking for depth and profound character development? Well, I hope not, because you won’t find that. No, you go to see a movie like Zoombies because you get to see a monkey rip someone’s fucking eyeballs out or get to see interns riding elephants through a zoo on the offensive. While the movie did take itself a bit too seriously, that only made it feel all the more like those disaster movie creature features of old. So, put your pinkies down, get off your high horses and check out Zoombies on Prime. I decided to double feature it and watched both Zoombies and Zoombies 2 and I gotta say, I highly recommend you do so as well. Zoombies 2 is even better than the first one!
Also, don’t forget to see what’s coming next in the Lousy Lottery. Make sure you tune into Twitter later today and vote for Lousy Lottery 33! My handle is @MrJosh79, look for it and don’t forget to vote!
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