John’s Horror Corner: Zombeavers (2015), bringing us mutant rabid animatronic zombie beavers in this fun cheap campy horror

MY CALL: This movie is dumb.  Really dumb.  But it’s also gory, campy, bad in a good way and full of laughs and weird things like werezombeavers. MOVIES LIKE Zombeavers:  Looking for more self-aware horror that will make you laugh?  Try Black Sheep (2006), Cabin Fever (2002), Cabin Fever 2 (2009), Cabin Fever: Patient Zero (2014), Shark Night 3D (2011), The Boneyard (1991), Critters (1986), Gremlins (1984), Ghoulies (1985), Piranha 3D (2010), Piranha 3DD (2012).

This flick dutifully pays homage to the likes of Piranha 3D (2010), which feels like an Academy Award winner next to this.  It answers what happens when an inexperienced director teams up with two inexperienced writers, none of whom having written or directed anything in horror?  Certainly nothing amazing, but perhaps something that’s still worth the price of admission at the very least…as long as you brought beer, that is.  That’s what Zombeavers is.  It’s the very least…the very least that it takes to watch a movie and not hate, regret or dislike it to the point that it cannot be enjoyed.

This movie is definitely funny (and fun in general), but there are scenes that I feel may not have been intentionally funny (although this film is very self-aware of its quality and tone).  The acting is deplorable, the writing is horrendous, there’s basically no story nor any clever shots to boast.  Yet I didn’t mind.

Perhaps a product of the film’s own self-awareness, no time is wasted before leaping into some lakeside nudity.  It may not be raining breasts in terms of the gratuitous nudity, but they got to it right away for those who care.  Later in the film we’ll endure some quintessentially tasteless sex scenes (brief nudity at most) that feel like a one-way ticket to pound town on frat row.  The sex dialogue is pretty funny.

The highlight of the film is animatronic beavers, which are delightfully bad.  After being exposed to some sort of toxic waste that was dumped in their lake, these rabid twitchy zombie beavers remind me of the glorious creature effects of the 80s.  Their spastic movements are reminiscent of evil Muppets or shaky-limbed gremlins.  While they are surely funny to watch, something about them remains menacing.  Really—I think the twitchiness makes them appropriately off-putting.  I’m somewhat reminded of the mounted deer head in Evil Dead 2 (1987) crossed with the trickster gopher from Caddyshack (1980).

As you can see BELOW, the shots very tasteful.

As if directly copying scenes out of Night of the Living Dead (1968), the zombeavers break their way through boarded up windows in the panicked victims’ vacation house and the deck of the tanning raft.  The beavers are pretty smart.  They chew through phone lines and know when to regroup.

If the cheap zombeavers were the best aspect of the film, the gore came next.  The rubber guts and torn latex flesh is thankfully abundant as throats are bitten and bodies sundered.

Quite a pleasure was the transformation of a bitten girl into a werebeaver zombie (or werezombeaver?)—not unlike what happened in Black Sheep (2006).  These infected victims behave as if they caught a beavered up version of the Evil Dead’s (2013) contagious zombie demonism.  After being infected, a young woman twerks her tail—YES, she grew a beaver tail—and terrorizes her friends with her buck teeth which pushed their way through her front teeth.  She even bites off a guy’s penis in the spirit of Piranha 3D (2010).  Yikes!

Clearly this flick has a good sense of humor.  At one point a guy throws his girlfriend’s dog in the water as a decoy for the beavers and when the zombeavers break their way through the cabin floor, it’s like a game of Whack-a-Mole.

 That poor dog. SMH

The ending (and opening) scene is gloriously stupid, along with the outtakes at the end.  My favorite outtake was the dog in the water being chased by the zombeaver props.

I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoyed the more recent movies listed above in “MOVIES LIKE Zombeavers.”