Zombeavers: The End of “So Bad It’s Good?”

I hope so. At least, the end of SBIG as an intent.

B-Movies are crap (to be perfectly blunt, so are most A-Movies. Now get off my lawn). But if they’re done right, B-Movies can transcend the idiocy of their storylines and become at least entertaining. And then there’s Zombeavers:

Zombeavers tried to embrace its stupid premise with allusions to Jaws and predictable plays on the double-meaning of “beaver.” Yet it never quite gets at what makes creature features so fun. It’s not just that they are stupid, and occasionally so poorly made that it’s laughable. It’s that the monsters might seem silly out of context, but the stakes are life and death! The stakes here are never grounded, in part because of the lack of energy from the cast, and in part because the script is dedicatedly sloppy with no apparent awareness to the sub genre’s finer points. It’s characters aren’t even recognizable stereotypes, and their actions make little to no sense other than filling the running time with dirty words, sex and violence. 

If you’re making a B-Movie, you’re still making a movie. There still needs to be a plot, and a conflict, and something resembling a protagonist. For further evidence, watch as Kurt Loder compares Zombeavers to a competently-made B-movie, Blood Glacier:

The new Austrian movie Blood Glacier isn’t actual crap, actually–it looks pretty good, and its cast isn’t entirely unacquainted with the craft of acting. But the movie’s tolerance for cheap genre rips is high, and its aspirations cheerfully low. It’s an old-school creature feature that seeks only to peel your nerves back and gross you out. It draws heavily on John Carpenter’s The Thing, with a few Alienflourishes bolted on, and it does its job.

Zombeavers is actual crap, as I think first-time feature director Jordan Rubin would happily agree. Rubin is a comedy writer who has churned out gags for Carson Daly, Craig Kilborn and Comedy Central. Now he has churned out Zombeavers, a riff on the old cabin-in-the-woods horror theme, and I’d guess he had a lot of fun doing it.

The problem with one-joke movies like this is that the joke is all in the title.

Yup.

you-think-youre-funny-but-youre-not

 

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