Zombeavers

It sounds like immediate condemnation to say that the best part of Zombeavers is the swanky lounge song that plays over the film’s end credits, but that’s not entirely true. Although the film can’t quite overcome its shoestring budget often enough to frighten or provoke laughs at a steady clip, there are effective nuggets of both that one can mine out to salvage the experience. Rather, acknowledging the song is simply giving one more credit where credit is due, because it manages to make one’s last impression of Zombeavers a bemused chuckle and head shake, at right about the time the Bill Murray-like lounge singer belts:
“So board up the doorways and windows my friend / It won’t do any good / Those furry round bastards are fully equipped / They’ll chew right through the wood.”
That little snippet is indicative of Zombeavers in its scattered handful of effective moments, which viewers may need to be on their toes to catch. The experience as a whole is a bit like rifling through moldy sandwiches at an automat, occasionally finding a side of fries you’re reasonably sure won’t make you ill. You need to be a little persistent, to let the duds wash over you and go on their merry way. Sticking around with any one joke too long will simply result in disgust or the nagging, difficult-to-answer question of “Why am I watching this again?”
Zombeavers is the feature-length film debut of director Jordan Rubin, and would certainly seem to share some Sharknado DNA, sporting the kind of mash-up Comic-Con tee shirt title that one can imagine marketers must have hoped would immediately turn it into an overnight Internet sensation. And maybe if it was premiering on Syfy, that would be the case, but Zombeavers is instead having its premiere today largely through VOD (including Amazon/iTunes) and a very limited theatrical run. And it feels like a movie going straight to VOD (the modern equivalent of straight-to-video clearance rack), for sure. In stretches, it feels like a film school class project that’s managing to overachieve just a tiny bit.
The set-up you could probably rattle off to me without having seen the film or its trailer—toxic waste spill creates zombeavers. College girls head to cabin in the woods for a weekend. Horny boyfriends show up. Everyone has sex and argues, right up to the moment where people start getting eaten by beavers. References to Return of the Living Dead in particular abound. Clichés are embraced in a fond, “Hey you old so-and-so, how have you been?!” sort of way.