When I was in middle school, a classmate let me borrow a VHS he had recently bought, or possibly stolen, from the local video store. Blood Lake — not to be confused with the Shannen Doherty lamprey movie of the same name that aired on Animal Planet last year — was a 1980’s, Z-grade horror film that some friends filmed in Oklahoma or Texas. It was terrible, and not in a good way.
I honestly have no idea how a small town video store in Michigan ended up with Blood Lake on the shelves in the early 1990’s, but somehow this Z-grade horror film received wide distribution. Today, a good small-budget horror film — with all of the current avenues to exposure — actually has a pretty good shot of becoming a cult classic. Zombeavers is just such a movie.
Zombeavers, now streaming on Netflix, follows a group of horny college students who travel to the weirdly mountainous wilderness of Indiana — the movie was filmed at the Golden Oak Ranch in California — for a weekend of drinking, swimming, and sex at a family cabin. Of course, unbeknownst to them, two medical waste haulers (cameos from comedian Bill Burr and John Mayer — yes, THAT John Mayer) accidentally dumped a barrel of radioactive waste into a nearby lake which contaminates a colony of beavers, making them blood-thirsty zombeavers.
If this sounds stupid, you’re absolutely correct because Zombeavers is really stupid, but it’s also a lot of fun. Director Jordan Rubin, who honed his comedy skills while working as a writer for several late-night talk shows, and the Comedy Central shows Crank Yankers and The Man Show, has crafted a nice addition to the horror comedy genre.
Zombeavers is weird and funny enough to keep it from becoming discarded as something similar to the junk SyFy airs like Mansquito or Dinocroc. Sure, it would fit in nicely with those films as part of a late-night movie marathon, but the script — co-written by Rubin with Al and Jon Kaplan — is actually too smart for SyFy.
Rubin blends classic horror movie tropes, like the grizzled, gun-toting local (Rex Linn) with witty dialogue, and pays homage to several horror films along the way. As tensions rise while the beavers relentlessly attack the cabin, something as simple as hammering a nail into a board generates chuckles. The absurdity of the dialogue continues to build along with the tension leading to an enjoyable experience, even as the doomed college students are bitten, scratched, and have trees fall on them.
Of course, the real stars are the zombeavers themselves. Rubin refrained from using computer effects to create his buck-toothed murderers, and instead had the special effects company Creature Effects design animatronic beavers. I’m not sure if deciding to go ahead with animatronic beavers in lieu of CGI was a budgetary move, but it was a brilliant decision by Rubin. The zombified beavers remind you of the taxidermied deer head from Evil Dead II and add an additional goofy element to Zombeavers.
Zombeavers may not have the production values of The Cabin in the Woods, or even Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, but it does a lot with its $2 million budget. Unlike the Sharknado series — Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! premieres July 22 on SyFy — which are fun to hate-watch due to the terrible CGI, even worse dialogue, and D-List celebrities, Zombeavers is just 77 minutes of honest-to-goodness entertainment.
Also, it has a kick ass theme song.
