Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Adam MacDonald
Starring: Olivia Holt, Froy Gutierrez, Carson MacCormac, Luke MacFarlane, Chloe Avakian
No other horror sub-genre has been milked as dry as the zombie movie. Adapted from a Young Adult novel by Courtney Summers, This is Not a Test is a late attempt to squeeze one last drop of juice from this tiresome setup. What makes writer/director Adam MacDonald's zombie movie stand out from all those that have gone before? Nothing, aside from its setting. MacDonald's film sees a group of teenage survivors hole up in their high school as they wait out the apocalypse. It's The Breakfast Club meets Dawn of the Dead, but never as interesting as such a mashup might suggest.
The central figure is Sloane (Olivia Holt), who is just about to off herself in the bath tub when the zombie outbreak interrupts her plans. Her abusive father now out of the picture thanks to being chewed on by the undead, Sloane ironically has a weight taken off her shoulders. She meets up with four other teens - alpha jock Cary (Corteon Moore), sensitive Rhys (Froy Gutierrez), and siblings Trace (Carson MacCormac) and Grace (Chloe Avakian) - as they make for the one place in town they know better than any other, their high school.
With his animal attacks thriller Out Come the Wolves, MacDonald proved adept at staging viciously rendered violence, and the zombie attacks we witness early on here have a similar brutal quality. Once our heroes barricade themselves in their makeshift sanctuary the life begins to drain from the movie as though it were itself bitten by a contagious zombie. We're left to watch a bunch of uninteresting kids mope around, argue a lot and eventually act on their romantic desires. The threat of the outside world almost becomes an afterthought until the arrival of one of their teachers (Luke Macfarlane), at which point we get the obligatory subplot concerning a character hiding a zombie bite.
When the heroes of Romero's Dawn of the Dead holed up in a shopping mall they lapped it up, able to enjoy the fruits of consumerism in a way they never could have before the world fell apart. This is Not a Test never takes advantage of its school setting to make any kind of point about how teens might live in a world without adults to boss them around. That the protagonists are teenagers here is rather arbitrary, and you imagine their behaviour wouldn't be much different if they were all a decade older.
Holt displayed impressive comic chops in the recent horror comedy Heart Eyes, but she struggles to make anything of the one-note Sloane, yet another horror protagonist who is defined almost exclusively by some past trauma (Sloane's mother passed away and her older sister left home, leaving her alone to face her father's fury). When a horror movie loads its female protagonist with such trauma, it's usually a cheap way of providing a juxtaposition with the tough, resourceful figure they're forced to become. But Sloane never goes through any substantial character development here, and her reliance on two of the male characters is surprising for a genre that has long centred its heroines.
This is Not a Test is on Shudder from May 22nd.
