Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015)

Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse arrives from 2015, directed by Christopher Landon, a man who had spent three films in the Paranormal Activity trenches and wanted something lighter. His stated ambition was a gory R-rated Goonies, or a Monster Squad with more viscera. He delivered a zombie comedy that opens in a laboratory, detours through a strip club, and ends with a bomb in a gymnasium. The critics were unkind. The box office was unkinder. The film took in sixteen million dollars against a twenty-four million dollar budget, which is its own quiet tragedy.

For the purposes of cultural classification, the film is nearly inert. Race never enters the frame as a subject. The lone Black performer, Hiram A. Murray, plays a corporal who is bitten before he meets the heroes and is dispatched shortly after his introduction. No LGBTQ characters appear. There is no environmental theme, no economic critique, no argument about bodies or brains or history. The film has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. It wants to show a zombie deer and a trampoline escape, and it does.

Denise, the cocktail waitress played by Sarah Dumont, receives a measure of competence the rest of the cast does not. She shoots, she drives, she pulls the scouts out of danger more than once, and she is allowed a personality. Yet she operates inside a movie whose signature set pieces involve a strip club and a running joke about scouting skills applied to a brothel. The gesture toward capability sits beside the ogling, and the ogling wins on points. This is a film from a register that has since gone quiet, made by people who never expected to be asked what it meant. We ask anyway. That is the job.