2017's Anna and the Apocalypse is the Single Greatest Scottish Zombie Teen Romance Zombie Musical Comedy EVER!
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
When I was a child, I loved and hated Christmas. I loved it because it was a shimmering, irresistibly shiny object the world adored and held in impossibly high esteem. I hated it because I was an undiagnosed autistic little Jewish boy who felt like even more of an outsider during a season that was seemingly for everyone BUT me.
When I got older, I learned that there were some advantages to being a Jew during Christmas time. Actually, there’s only really one advantage to being a Jew during Christmas time: you can work with a clear conscience while all your gentile colleagues are at home with their families and loved ones, opening gift-wrapped presents under a majestic Christmas tree while sipping hot cocoa before a crackling fire.
That might not seem like much. It’s not much, but it is something. Christmas is the real deal. Hannukah is, at best, an acceptable consolation prize. That said, having Hannukah wasn’t much of a consolation when everyone else got Christmas.
me looking in the windows of Christians Christmas morning.
Though it has become a thought crime punishable by death to say “Merry Christmas” in a post-Obama era, or even to think about Christmas, our entire economy nevertheless depends upon the Christmas shopping system.
I can’t even imagine what capitalism would look like without Christmas. It’s the roly, poly, impossibly generous Santa Claus who makes the great evil of capitalism possible.
When I worked at Blockbuster video, I got paid time and a half for working Christmas. That was seven dollars and forty-seven cents an hour! I could almost retire on a windfall like that.
Because Christmas means nothing to me, beyond the agony of never fitting in and feeling like the world excluded me because of who I am and what I believe, I could do things like see Mr. Magoo in the theater the day it came out so that I could review it for The A.V. Club.
Today, literally, that meant that while all the non-Jews were enjoying the most wonderful day of the year, I was able to slip away and watch Anna and the Apocalypse for a very special, very generous, and very appreciated patron.
John McPhail’s feature film adaptation of Ryan McHenry’s short film Zombie Musical fits in snugly with the current Zombiepocalypse.
The two most important films of the new era of undead entertainment are 2002’s 28 Days Later and 2004’s Shaun of the Dead.
28 Days Later introduced zombies who were fast, agile and ferocious. This set them apart from the conventional depiction of the undead as slow, lumbering, not terribly bright and consequently not that difficult to kill.
Shaun of the Dead, meanwhile, took the dark humor and social commentary of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead series into a more overtly comedic direction, in part by fusing it with romantic comedy.
Anna and the Apocalypse is a post-Shaun of the Dead zom- rom-com that combines zombies, romantic comedy, teen comedy, Holiday cheer and, finally, song and dance.
In Anna and the Apocalypse, Ella Hunt plays Anna Shepherd, a Scottish teenager who plans to travel to Australia before going to college, much to the dismay of her father, Tony (Mark Benton).
She’s restless, strong-willed, and independent, as well as traumatized by the death of her mother.
Anna is dealing with the usual teenage drama bullshit at her school’s Christmas show—a best friend who is secretly in love with her, a regrettable one-night stand with a jock and peers filled with the requisite angst—as well as Arthur Savage (Paul Kaye), the school’s evil vice principal.
Kaye is hilarious as a hiss-worthy villain so hateable that you want to see him beheaded whether he’s a zombie or not. Not all monsters are undead or supernatural: some are just raging assholes obsessed with power.
The next day Anna and her peers show up at school and are more than a little chagrined to find themselves in the midst of a zombie apocalypse.
They don’t have service for their cell phones but they do have the internet so they’re able to see, for example, that, tragically, Justin Bieber has been bitten and is now a zombie. Probably still a better fate than being gifted to Diddy as a teenager.
The resourceful teens keep sane by playing games like Fuck, Marry, Kill with Zombie Beyonce, Zombie Miley Cyrus and Zombie Rihanna.
In short film form, Anna and the Apocalypse was a parody of High School Musical filled with songs in the style of Disney’s insanely lucrative musical.
Anna and the Apocalypse is essentially High School Zombie Christmas Musical. The pop songs are slick and professional but not particularly catchy or memorable. None of the songs here stood out for being good or bad.
It’s unfortunately not one of those musicals that leave you with a pep in your step or a song in your heart.
Anna and her friends find themselves in an all-out war for survival as they attempt to avoid a bite that will transform them from the living to the shambling undead.
The zombies in Anna and the Apocalypse are slow, feeble, and as easy to burst open as a pinata at a child’s birthday party. Anna and the Apocalypse is not particularly scary because it has so much else going on. It’s not overly concerned with scares because it’s seventeen different genres simultaneously, only one of which is horror.
I quite enjoyed Anna and the Apocalypse. It’s a painless way to pass 98 minutes. It is, without a doubt, the best Scottish Teen Christmas Romantic Comedy Zombie Musical I have ever seen. It is also the only Scottish Teen Christmas Romantic Zombie Musical.
So, if you are looking for something offbeat and new this Christmas, why not give it a try? It’s way better than watching Home Alone or Christmas Vacation for the fortieth time.
Incidentally, I’ve been posting less frequently here because it is the end of the year, but also because I am deep into finishing The Fractured Mirror, my book on American movies about filmmaking.
It takes enormous work to write a dense, 500-page book and then do draft after draft after draft until you can’t refine it any further.
I am biased, but I could not be happier with The Fractured Mirror. I wanted it to be my Christmas gift to y’all this year but, as always, life threw a monkey wrench in my plans. It should be available in late January/early February.
It will be worth the wait.
Merry Christmas, one and all, and to all a good night!
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can! It’s Christmas, after all, the most