Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas
For this year’s fifth entry, we find teenagers’ ambitions to escape their small-town life upended by the arrival of a zombie plague. Survival means they’ll have to resort to… singing and dancing in Anna and the Apocalypse!
A pandemic is gradually spreading around the globe and turning people into zombies, but that’s only a rumor on the radio. Of more immediate concern are Anna’s hopes of taking a gap year in Australia after graduation. Her father doesn’t want her to, partly due to finances, partly due to the recent death of her mother. Her friends all have their own concerns—her best friend John is in love with her but too afraid to make a move, student reporter Steph is having her stories dropped from the paper and failing to connect with her fellow students, and Chris is going to fail his media production class if he can’t create a sample video that reveals the real him.
Obviously, all these concerns get tossed over, but never fully disappear, once the zombie apocalypse arrives on the night of the Christmas play. Anna and John wake up safe at their homes and Steph and Chris have taken shelter at the bowling alley. They realize all their friends and family are still at the school and have to make their way there to reunite with the people most important to them. Meanwhile, tensions at the school are rising between those who want to leave to find their missing loved ones and those who want to remain in authority at the school.
And it’s a musical. Because of course it is.
And it’s an absolute delight. I loved this movie, just loved every aspect of it. It’s scrappy, it’s clever, and it has surprisingly subtle character turns. Anna has a douchebag ex-boyfriend who feels, at every moment, like the worst kind of creep. However, he has one line that reveals what all his bravado and cockiness is trying to mask as well as the precise shape of his sense of compassion for her that caught me completely off-guard. In fact, the movie was consistently catching me off-guard even though, much like Shaun of the Dead, there’s a scene early on that more than foreshadows everything that’s going to come.
Which speaks to the two things the movie does very well: it’s precisely constructed and it’s compelling. Looking at it from the perspective of being a coming-of-age/high-school-musical film, there are certain genre conventions you’d expect. While those characters are here, they don’t fall into the expected roles and they each have a meaningful arc. To the other point, I liked all these characters, even the ones I didn’t. They all seemed real to me and their reactions to each other were well-drawn. I believed in their relationships even when they had moments I hadn’t seen in a movie before.
Since the movie is a zombie movie, it naturally isn’t about the zombies but rather about what people do to each other when the status quo is disrupted. Much like Night of the Living Dead, it’s not so much the zombies that are the threat as it is the survivors and the limits of their humanity. Here, that manifests in the role of Vice Principal Savage, a suitably self-righteous authoritarian who’s more than willing to watch everyone die if they don’t respect his leadership. His superciliousness is elevated to the level of sociopathy once the outbreak begins and, frankly, I could have used more of that. We have just brief moments of him belittling Anna because her father is the school janitor and exercising his authority over the students simply because he can, but when he’s revealed to be truly monstrous in the final act of the film, it feels a little rushed, like they needed someone to be the villainous human. There is a director’s cut where he has an additional song that was cut because it made him truly irredeemable, but I work in education. I know that man. He is irredeemable from the moment he gloats to Anna that he’s going to make her father scrub the toilets. Accept that he’s a monster.
As for the film as a musical, I’d say it succeeds on that level as well since I’ve been listening to the soundtrack on repeat since watching the film. The songs are catchy as hell and filled with small references to zombie movies. It’s all just so well done.
Of course, it hits a little differently due to the pandemic. The emotional core of the film is the need to reduce the distance between yourself and your family, to find a way to touch them again after being separated and isolated by this threat that seems to have come from nowhere. There’s even a song about being connected to our phones and screens, but through the lens of turning to these devices for human contact, not likes and clout. Because the movie gets its characters’ core emotions right, it resonates emotionally even though our context has changed.
This is a fun movie, one I loved and am 100% adding to my annual holiday watchlist along with Miracle on 34th Street, Scrooged, and What Would Jesus Buy? Also, unlike The Day of the Beast, the Christmas setting isn’t incidental: characters are gathered at the school due to the Christmas pageant, they have to make their way through a Christmas tree warehouse, and Anna uses a giant candy cane to beat various zombies to death. It leans into the Christmas stuff where The Day of the Beast felt like it was coincidental.
To make things even better, the movie is streaming through both Hoopla and Kanopy—services you may have free access to through your local library.
Libraries rock.
5/5 Scottish Santa-smashing sirens
Anna and the Apocalypse is currently available to stream on Kanopy and Hoopla.
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