The dead will have this club for breakfast. Seven misfit students must band together against a growing gang of unhuman savages. The group’s trust in each other is tested to the limit in a brutal, horrifying fight to survive and they must take down the murderous zombie creatures… before they kill each other first.
Filmmaker Marcus Dunstan has been around the block when it comes to horror features, all of them patchy at best. He’s the man behind “The Collector” trilogy (the third installment, entitled “The Collected” is currently in production). He co-wrote four of the “Saw” chapters, as well as penned “Piranha 3DD.” So yeah, quantity surely doesn’t equal quality in his case. Dunstan’s latest foray into the genre, the Blumhouse-produced, made-for-streaming comedic horror “Unhuman” may just mark his best film yet… which isn’t saying much.
Ever (Brianne Tau) is stuck on a nightmare bus ride filled with high school stereotypes: the jocks, who terrorize the freaks by throwing Slurpees at them; the sullen freaks, who take the abuse; the sweaty, pervy-looking bus driver; and the smarmy teacher who thinks he’s funnier than he is. Shit hits the fan soon when the bus crashes and the students are left stranded. According to the radio, there’s a global zombie outbreak.
Our young heroes make their way through foggy woods to a decrepit building with a torn-up deer carcass (which makes for one of the film’s best, and grossest, visual gags). It doesn’t take long for the undead to surface. Before you can groan, “Not another fuckin’ zombie flick,” a highly elaborate twist comes along about halfway through the narrative. Whether one goes with the demented silliness of the film’s second half depends on their ability to utterly suspend disbelief.
“Unhuman” sustains — for the most part — a lively pace and a playful, tongue-in-cheek tone. “Wait, I thought you weren’t eating anything with a face,” the vegan Ever is told when about to snack on some gummy worms. The bus crash is awesome, with a slow-motion portrayal of each student either puking or getting injured, “Death Proof”-style. Speaking of, the film seems weirdly indebted to Tarantino’s cult classic, its finale mimicking another one of its crucial sequences.
“Baby, why are you always sweet to me when no one else is around?” a blonde bimbo asks her jock boyfriend in a cunning example of the film getting “satire” right. Other jokes fall flat on their face. “Do you have insurance?” a particularly obnoxious character asks a zombie. Another one of our heroes justifies his decision to go left: “Because it’s the only direction that’s not making weird sounds.”
Faces get torn off, bodies hacked to bits. The gore is wisely shown sparingly, and the make-up looks fantastic. The cast is uniformly decent, with Tau making for a strong heroine for whom it’s easy to root. Ali Gallo is another standout, totally believable in the more far-fetched sequences. Benjamin Wadsworth hams it up a notch but not enough to derail the plot. One could argue it’s already derailed enough by that twist.
The anti-bullying message may be piled on a smidge too thick. The titular “unhuman” doesn’t so much refer to the zombies as it does to the insensitivity of bullies, which sometimes renders them soulless akin to, well, zombies. Case in point: the teacher casually murmurs, “No fat-shaming,” as he watches an overweight student squeeze into the bus, impervious to the young man’s, you know, feelings. The entire damn twist revolves around bullying: how some peak in high school, while others don’t outgrow their feelings of inferiority.
Subtlety is not Dunstan’s strong suit. An overabundance of slo-mo shots, repetitive, inconsequential dialogue (“Please don’t go out there”), and frequent sappy moments (“Just leave me alone. You’re good at that”) drag down the otherwise taut narrative. “High school doesn’t end,” says one of the geeks, “it spreads.” Like a zombie virus, that is. A flawed parable about the perils of being a teenager, as well as a halfway-decent horror flick, “Unhuman” may not reinvent the wheel, but, despite focusing on teens, it showcases Marcus Dunstan at his most mature and inventive yet.
Available on Digital HD Friday, June 3rd
