A children’s animated adventure based on an idea by Clive “Hellraiser” Barker? It’s a new one on us and yet, why not. All the best children’s stories have gory origins, from anonymous folklore to the Brothers Grimm. Here, the premise is fairly simple: zoo animals are becoming zombified and our heroes, a young wolf (Gabbi Kosmidis) and world-weary mountain lion (David Harbour) plus a growing posse of the non-zombified, must try to a) escape and b) put a stop to the zombification.
It’s not the most complex premise – the Barker original, called Zoombies, is an unpublished short story – and this occasionally shows, in that there’s not an awful lot of narrative to go around. The film-makers address this by running a parallel commentary on the story beats and structure from one of the characters, a funny/annoying lemur, who is a horror-movie buff and who has seen all the classics of the genre. (Inspired, no doubt, by Randy from the Scream franchise, with the same flavour of meta analysis.) For children to whom this is an early encounter with that kind of smart aleck, media-savvy, reference-heavy humour, this may well prove delightfully witty, and it does have its moments for the older crowd too. But drawing attention to the film’s employment of tropes and formula isn’t really original enough for this lampshading approach to feel subversive.
One of the commendable choices here – from an adult point of view – is that the zombie animals are genuinely fairly horrible, and depending on the children in question, this may well be even more of a bonus for them. A sufficiently horror-hungry kid with macabre taste and an appetite for all things ghoulish will get a kick out of a film that doesn’t hold back, while the more fainthearted little ones will be having nightmares for weeks. That may or may not be good thing – just send the makers of Night of the Zoopocalypse the dry cleaning bill.
• Night of the Zoopocalypse is in UK and Irish cinemas from 10 October, and in Australian cinemas from 16 October.
