This Is Not A Test

A group of high school students take shelter within their school during a zombie apocalypse, and while there, they confront their various emotional issues.

At this point in the modern pop culture landscape, there are basically two things that consistently hurt the zombie genre the most.

The first problem is the whole Walking Dead franchise. Once seen as the genre’s savior, as well as the driving force behind its revitalization, in the end, all it ended up doing was to squeeze every ounce of blood from its undead corpse, and basically run the zombie apocalypse genre into the ground. Over the long course of its multi-decade, multi-show run, the Walking Dead franchise made its way through almost every single zombie plot possible, often rehashing them terribly, and the lingering result is, now every casual watcher thinks The Walking Dead, with its inconsistent rules and world-building, and its often nonsensical and terrible narrative decisions that seem to mostly be based off of whims (not to mention its consistently dumb as shit weapon designs), is the standard bearer by which everything zombie is judged, instead of what it really is... the zombie apocalypse genre version of a McDonald's, a cheap factory built to constantly churn out product with as little consideration of quality as possible. In short, The Walking Dead is what happens when a decent idea becomes a COPORATE BRAND. This is the reality of capitalism, and exactly what happens when you apply a bottom-line approach to a creative endeavor.

It’s disappointing, but... that's the world we live in.

The second problem, the thing that hobbles the whole genre, and is the sad truth behind why zombie movies are dismissed by most people and are still considered to be trash cinema... the low budget zombie films.

I know, I know… blasphemy, right?

After all, the low budget zombie movie is more than just the genre’s bread and butter. It’s the source of the whole kit and caboodle. It’s how it all got started way back in 1968, nothing but a bunch of friends tromping around the countryside with a camera and some ketchup. And that’s an amazing thing, an inspiring thing, and when the magic works, it’s incredible. But in much the same way that the internet proved that the downside of giving everyone a voice was that everyone had a voice, the relative ease with which any burgeoning filmmaker can wander into the woods with some bottles of Heinz and a few buddies, and then come out a couple hours later with a movie, means that quality control is basically in the toilet. What this means is, if you're a fan of the zombie apocalypse genre, then you end up watching a lot of crap.

So, with that having been said... This Is Not A Test.

So...

It’s December 1998, and our story begins in a quaint little every-neighborhood of idyllic suburban mediocrity. Unfortunately, within the tranquility of this Pleasant Vally Sunday, there is a house of sadness and abuse, and we meet young Sloane Price (whose name is our first clue that this film is an adaptation of a YA novel) as she contemplates suicide, reading her note in the bath. Her mother is gone. Her older sister has left home. She is all alone with her abusive prick of a patriarchal loser father, and she just can't stand the thought of having one more breakfast with him. But before their issues can come to a head, their world is suddenly shattered by someone screaming and pounding at the front door…

Outside their house, the zombie shit has hit the fan.

Soon enough, it’s inside the house too, and Sloane is forced to run into the street as a zombie attacks her father, infecting him. Several zombies chase her.

One day later…

Five young people are dashing through an empty school, desperately trying to block off windows and entrances. There’s Cary Chen (whose name is our second clue that this film was adapted from a YA novel), a class president/quarterback type who immediately assumes the leadership role. There’s Rhys Moreno (the 3rd clue), a big, smart, and sensitive basset hound of a kid, who is clearly destined for the friendzone. There’s Grace and Trace Casper (whose dumb names are our final and undeniable clue that this film is based off a YA Novel), a pair of siblings. Trace is wearing a long sleeve tshirt under an unbuttoned button-up shirt, and a necklace made out of thick metal links, so he’s clearly the Troubled and Angry Skater Kid. Grace, meanwhile, is wearing a nice sweater with a high collar, which means she’s The Good Girl. Rounding out the group is our now clearly traumatized heroine, Sloane, who is drenched in blood. This means that the gang’s all here… A Jock, a Brain, a Criminal, a Princess, and a Basketcase.

The kids deal with a zombie principal rambling about in the administration office, and then they set about barricading the school. Afterwards, they gather in the gym, where they hear an automated shelter-in-place message on the radio.

We then jump back one day…

In the chaos of the first day, zombies everywhere, we get to see how this group meets up, and how originally, Trace and Grace’s mom was there too. Her absence from the school scene we just watched tells us that it’s only a matter of time until she dies. Especially because Mom and Cary clash over leadership decisions when they all spend the first night in an abandoned, blood-splattered house. The blood splattered house feels off while you're watching, because the blood splatter tells us that someone either fought or became a zombie there, which implies that someone lived there, and yet… the house is also weirdly empty of furniture in a way that tells us that this is actually an empty house the production rented out for filming, but didn't bother to dress at all.

Anyway, our heroine falls asleep in a bedroom without any furniture.

In her dream, we jump back farther in time to the days when Sloane’s sister Lily was still around, before their father's abuse forced Lily to leave. On the day that she leaves home, Lily first drives Sloane to school and once there, she gives her a yellow envelope as a birthday present. Sloane decides to read the card later, so she leaves the envelope inside the car's glove compartment, and gets out and goes in to the school.

This is known as Chekov’s Envelope.

Sloane awakens with a sudden start! There’s a strange noise downstairs in the house! What could it be? You guessed it… It’s zombies. The group runs off through the backyards, and decide to head to the high school. It’s at this point that mom meets her end in a noble sacrifice that can only be called Obi-wan-ian. Well, that, and "completely unnecessary" too, as she could have just kept running, instead of standing there and waiting to get eaten. Anyway, the kids make it to to the school, and the circle is now complete, we have caught up to the previous scene of them blocking the entrances and windows.

For some reason, it takes Sloane a full day and night to wash her face. I don’t know why, but instead of washing someone else's potentially contagious blood off of her face, she spends all day hanging out in the gym and chatting as if she isn't covered in blood, and then they all sleep on mats in the gym. It isn’t until the next day that she finally goes to the bathroom and washes her face.

Potentially kissable once again, we now have some dramatic hanging out, as the teens bicker and drink and have sex and play Never Have I Ever. Y’know, teenage stuff. There’s also a creepy English teacher hiding in the school, who is armed, and also maybe infected. Due to all of this, they take his gun and kick him out. During all the hub-bub, the creepy teacher petulantly bites Cary. Now the teems have to agonize and argue over the question of "at what point does a person who has been bitten become infectious?" And all while Cary is in isolation. Well, except for Grace who proves that she's not the Good Girl, she's the Naughty Girl, so she sneaks into Cary's isolation and shows that, as Samantha Fox assured us back in the late 80s, naughty girls need love too. The teens eventually figure out that the zombie virus is most likely dormant until it is activated upon the death of the infected host, which means that a bite from an infected person who has not yet died and reanimated as a zombie, despite being infected, is no worse than a bite from the incredibly dirty, highly infectious mouth of the average every day human being.

So, Cary is not infected. Phew! Well, he may have a staph infection...

Unfortunately, the creepy teacher has gotten back inside, and is now a zombie. During the resulting scuffle, Trace accidentally shoots and kills Grace, and oh my goddess, everyone is sad and mad, and there’s even more fighting. And then Trace commits suicide. So much sadness, you guys.

But just when everything is darkest, the radio announces a safe zone a couple hours away. Sloane, alone with her two potential boyfriends, both of whom are in love with her, and both of whom handsome, but in different ways, decide to leave the school, find a car, and drive to a safe location. But more importantly, who will Sloane choose... Rhys or Cary?

It's Rhys, but only because Cary is most likely killed by zombies in yet another noble sacrifice that I think was supposed to be a kind of rebalancing of the scales after what happened to Trace and Grace's Mom, but whatever. Sloane finds Lily’s car, and a zombified Lily (sad), who she has to kill (even sadder), and she and Rhys drive away. Sloane reads her birthday card in the glove box and decides to toss out her suicide note, choosing life in the zombie apocalypse, and proving that even though it's the end of the world as she knows it, she feels fine.

Right from the start, This Is Not A Test reminds us of how important cardio is when it comes to a zombie apocalypse. This is always an unfortunate thing to be reminded of when you're an aging nerd with bad knees.

Other than that, your main takeaway will probably be that this is a bad film. And it’s full spectrum bad too, pretty much every possible aspect of movie-making. But it's not horrendous either. It's not laughably bad. It's not even a "fun watch" bad. It's just... not very well-done. And sure, a big reason for why that is can be laid at the feet of the very obvious low budget, but otherwise...

This is a film with a litany of problems.

The geography of the action, the sense of where the characters are, how big of an area they're in, where they’re going, and how long it will take, is never established. I don't need a map, but just a sense, becuse it all feels so untethered. And because of this, the transitions between the scenes as they’re moving through this zombie-ravaged suburb step on each other so much, it’s like the characters are teleporting. This is the kind of thing that you normally don’t notice in a film, unless it’s really poorly done. Weren’t they just in the street? How’d they get in these backyards? Shit like this is never clear, and the characters don’t even say anything either. “We just need to go two blocks, and we can hole up there!” Or “my house is all the way across town, but we can stick to the alleys.” Nothing like that. At one point, they’re peeking around a house, and it's maybe at their high school, but there’s no shot to tell us where the high school is, or which direction, or how close it is. Again, this is all budget. They probably had one small block to shoot on, and were forced to use very closely shot, different angles of the exact same areas, but regardless of how it came about, the result is a film full of nagging little holes.

And that's a big problem here. There's larger issues, sure, with the direction and acting and various technical issues, but mostly it's just a ton of little nagging holes.

Like, for instance, the continuity on Sloane’s blood-makeup, that is covering her face for a surprisingly amount of screen-time, is appallingly bad. The thickness, the way it covers her face, how damp it is... sometimes it will change multiple times in a single scene. Then there's the time jumps. I can't figure out what they supposedly bring to the the story in the first place that would necessitate using them instead of just telling the story in a mostly linear order. There's definitely no surprises hidden in the non-linnear recounting, or at least, none that aren't immediately incredibly obvious, like the sudden appearance of a new character we know doesn't appear in scenes that take place later on, for instance. In fact, oftentimes, when a story does have time jumps like this–much like in Prequels–the only result is the story kills off any of its potential tension or twists. On top of this, the dialogue almost never sounds like something a real person might say, let alone a teenager. In fact, if I had to guess, I'd bet that a lot of the stuff the characters say to each other in the various and sundry "heart-to-heart" scenes, were actually all inner monologues in the book the film was adapted from. The result is incredibly clunky as the filmmakers try to force "emotional" moments. The same is true for a lot of the characters' actions. I can't imagine a person putting a birthday card into the dirty black hole limbo that is a car's glove compartment, instead of just putting it in their backpack. But, much like forcing the characters to say out loud the kind of things that a regular person would be more likely to keep to themselves, and certainly wouldn't speak of in such straightforward terms, this is a cheat done in the service of the story. Their point is to get to that end-moment where she's in the car and then remembers the envelope from her sister that she never read, so then we see her open it, and be inspired by it, and as she smiles serenly, she symbolically throws away her suicide note. "That moment is the whole story!" the hack writer would say, fists clenched and holding up their moleskine notebook. To which a real writer would respond "Then why not just have her keep her backpack with her?" This kind of shit is what happens when a writer won't kill some of their babies, and also, honestly, has bad story instincts. Not to mention is a lazy about research and rewrites. A microcosm of this issue is how, at one point, Sloane fires a gun until it’s empty, then throws it away, like it’s an empty juice box or something.

You know those are reusable, right?

Now, just from having been in a myriad of writing groups and classes throughout my life, I know some people will excuse this by saying: "Oh, well... she's a girl. She doesn't know anything about guns." And first of all, well then, why the fuck is she shooting one with accuracy? Secondly, that's fucking misogynistic bullshit. Thirdly, I refuse to believe there is such a thing as a modern day American/Canadian (who isn't some homeschool freak that doesn't enjoy pop culture), who'd have zero idea how a fucking pistol works. Sure, you may not know how to specifically reload this specific pistol, but you would know that it can be reloaded, and that when it is, it will have value for you in a zombie apocalypse...

But the author/filmmaker doesn't want this, because the main reason they do something like this is because they don't want their characters to have a gun to rely on, because it's "more difficult" for them without one. So they cheat to achieve that goal. That's what these moments are, all these unnatural feeling, or inorganic, or unearned actions, reactions, and dialogue? Those are all failures or cheats. Which is bad. The idea that the characters don't have a gun? That's fine. My point here is, there's better ways of achieving that goal. But this is what you get when an author or filmmaker clearly know nothing about a subject, usually because they just aren't all that interested in it, but despite this, their arrogance pushes them to decide to write a story in that space, because they not only have no way of recognizing their ignorance, specifically due to that ignorance, but also because, they believe that it's not important information that they need to know, and on top of that, they often seem to believe everyone feels the same way as they do, so that means no one else will ever notice their ignorance, or care. So they gloss over stuff, or skip it, or don't give it much thought, or pause and maybe do a bit of research, because they think it's beneath them. When a writer has that attitude, the end result is always the same... a bad story, poorly told.

Which is what you get here. Especially as the film leans hard into a lot of the classic tropes and group conflicts that often occur in zombie movies, but here it all feels very paint-by-numbers, very unearned, seemingly relying instead on the idea that the audience’s familiarity with the genre (thanks to the seemingly ubiquitous presence of The Walking Dead, most likely) means we’ll just fill in the blanks for them, and this is always bad storytelling. Always. If you don't lay your foundation properly, your building will collapse.

Now, normally, I don't like to ding stories or movies (especially ones with limited resources) for these little nagging bits of weirdness and mistakes, mostly because these things happen, no biggie, and honestly, by themselves usually don't matter all that much. It's just when there are so many that they become hard to ignore.

Plus–and this one is probably more me than anything else, probably a little more subjective–but the worst sin here is that the film has nothing to say, and it doesn’t seem to even attempt to. I mean, you've got your basic cast of "Pretty Kids With Problems" that we've seen so many shows center on, and the whole thing is not only set in a zombie apocalypse, with all its usual attendant social themes and whatnot, but its specifically set in a high school, even almost directly apeing the Breakfast Club, and yet there's no over-arching attempt to tie the issues of today's teens with the stripped-down necessity of surviving a zombe apocalypse? Sloane is introduced to us while she is contemplating suicide, due to the constant violence and abuse she experiences at the hands of her father, and yet, there's just... zero connective tissue there between that and the violence of society as illuminated by a sudden zombie apocalypse? Often times, the entire point of setting a zombie film in “nice” small town or in a “quiet” suburb is meant to highlight the resulting violent chaos as a metaphor of privilege, a way of playing with the idea that “this kind of stuff isn’t supposed to happen here." But there’s none of that here.

I mean... what's the point of even making this film?

Written by Courtney Summers, the book is often described as a Breakfast Club meets 28 Days Later, which isn’t accurate, because as we all know… the 28 Days Later movies are NOT zombie movies, a fact that was proven by the last two films, 28 Years Later and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, both of which are great. So, maybe it’s better to say something like: John Hughes meets George Romero, but watered down, so, so, so very watered down. In the end, I feel like this story needed to make a choice and either lean into George a little more or into John a little more, because as it is, it just isn’t enough of either to be satisfying.

I did like that the movie was set in 1998. Despite currently living in an era of white-supremacy-driven misinformation, I feel like a "real" zombie apocalypse wouldn't be able happen in the era of smart phones and social media platforms. Once important information could be shared quickly and easily and directly into everyone’s hands, the ability for the zombie virus to spread due to surprise, mass confusion, and a general ignorance when it comes to how to deal with the problem, was significantly impacted. You could still get small outbreaks sure, and I'm sure whole communities could be destroyed by deciding that it was all "fake news" but worldwide? To the level that it could cause a complete societal collapse?

Unfortunately… nah.

In the end, this is a surprisingly amateurish film for what otherwise looks like a small, but too small low budget film. Especially as it has at least two reasonably recognizable faces in it too, one being the female lead from the recent film Heart Eyes, and the other from the fantastic streaming show From. But then, maybe this was filmed years ago, and it's only being released now because those two are a bit more known? Maybe? I don't know. Either way, with its terrible dialogue, weak characters, and myriad of technical failings, this thing feels more like a particularly bad Project Greenlight movie, and we don't even get a reality show where one episode is devoted to the director trying to pull off multiple nepotisms.

Thumb’s way, way down. Nothing to see here.