ZOMBEAVERS

CONTAINS ZOMSPOILERS

Let's get this one out of the way fairly quickly: this year's FrightFest had one of the strongest lineups in years but as in everything in life, there's invariably someone letting the side down. I know you can't get a coconut every time, but this one doesn't even know what coconuts look like, let alone where they are or how to pretend to aim roughly in their general direction. A one-joke movie whose entire script meeting consisted of bolting the words "zombie" and "beavers" together, it's obviously not any good, it knows it's not any good, it doesn't care that it's not very good, so why even bother moaning about it?

Three hot young girls go off to a remote cabin by the lake for some time away from their hunky menfolk after one of them was photographed cheating. But it's not long after the guys turn up that the local beaver population, contaminated by carelessly lost toxic waste, turn into flesh-eating undead Zombeavers, felling trees to block the only roads, biting through the phone lines, attacking our despicable ensemble...

So why bother moaning about it? Because it's lazy, stupid, shoddy (whether the shoddiness is a deliberate stab at wannabe cult status is hardly the point) and full of people so fundamentally unlikable that I signed up to Team Beaver about 15 minutes in. More work has gone into the end title song, a faux-Sinatra big band number that essentially recaps the relative highlights of the previous 70 miserable minutes. But then composers Al and Jon Kaplan (who incidentally seemed to be channelling the peerless Jerry Goldsmith in their score for Zombeavers) have been doing movie parodies in show tune form for years; it's just a shame that you have to wait for the end credits to start rolling for any actual wit. The rest of the movie is barely Asylum level trash.

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