Zombie High Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		1.5

Zombie High Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 1, 2016

Ira Levin gave the world some of its most iconic plot conceits ever. A Kiss Before Dying hinged upon a neat twist which probably played better in its literary formulation than on screen. But Rosemary's Baby? Has there ever been a more potent basic concept delivered so unforgettably in either its original novel or eventual cinematic form? The Boys From Brazil was another incredible tour de force that kept readers guessing for quite a while until its shocking denouement was revealed (a revelation the film version probably spoiled too early due to one central character needing to appear on screen, where his distinctive appearance let the figurative cat out of the bag). In between Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil, Levin offered up a few other novelistic delights, including the as yet unfilmed This Perfect Day, an entry which was Levin’s own offering in the dystopian future subgenre previously exploited by George Orwell in 1984 and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. This Perfect Day didn’t cause quite the furor that Rosemary’s Baby had (understandably), but Levin’s next novel, The Stepford Wives, introduced a chilling “high concept” while also offering a new phrase to describe (forced) conformity. Zombie High takes a page out of Levin’s Stepford set up by positing a coterie of individuals who are being “turned” into compliant souls due to various underhanded schemes, but unlike Levin’s original version (or even the fitfully engaging original film version), Zombie High has none of the angst or even social commentary. The film is definitely a curio due to its rather eclectic cast, but these “zombies” (a figurative term) are simply more boring than undead.

Voiceovers that play during the credits quickly establish that Andrea (Virginia Madsen) has decided to transfer into a tony prep school named Ettinger, something that doesn’t exactly please her boyfriend Barry (James Wilder). Two early incidents at Ettinger indicate that some sort of creepy goings on are happening. A teacher named Philo (Richard Cox) shows up out of nowhere and instantly grates on Barry’s protective instincts. More portentously (and one of first of many point of view changes Zombie High engages in) an elderly man spies on Andrea from a window. That turns out to be Ettinger’s head honcho, Dean Eisner (Kay E. Kuter).

Any feelings of foreboding are at least temporarily set aside as Andrea begins to meet other students at the formerly all male enclave. Among the first wave of female classmates is Andrea’s roommate Suzi (Sherilyn Fenn), a girl who doesn’t mind the male to female ratio at the school, and who is also not above using her feminine wiles to entice various guys. Also in Andrea’s rooming house is southern belle Mary Beth (Clare Carey). Hanging around the edges is a nerd named Emerson (Paul Feig), a hapless sort who witnesses the arrival of bad boy Felner (Scott Coffey), the son of a Senator who, along with many other powerful people (evidently including former presidents), is an Ettinger alum.

There are film schools credited toward the end of Zombie High, which lends credence to the feeling that this was put together by folks who were at the beginnings of their careers, careers which in some instances (like that of director Ron Link) never seemed to materialize in any meaningful way, at least as evidenced by a near lack of IMDb credits. Zombie High is haphazardly structured, repeatedly veering away from Andrea’s perspective to offer a cinematic equivalent of an omniscient narrator, a tendency which repeatedly sucks any and all tension out of the proceedings. Far too much information is shared too early, and then wasted. Instead of increasing knowledge on the part of the audience leading to an increased sense of fear for the heroine, quite the opposite happens, leaving energy levels listless throughout. The audience knows that the kids of Ettinger are being used for some nefarious experiments which leaves them more or less "lobotomized" (as Andrea terms it later in the film), but there's no sense of urgency or even danger.

Adding to the chaotic feeling are several extremely odd choices in editing, where scenes ping pong off of each other interstitially instead of proceeding to a natural breakaway point. This “interrupting” quality is actually off putting in a couple of sequences which should up the angst level significantly, but which simply fall flat due to the fact that any time even an incrementally spooky thing happens, the story cuts away to another subplot for at least a moment before returning to the ostensibly scary stuff.

Performances are all over the map in this piece, another element adding a kind of amateurish quality to the proceedings. Madsen does what she can with an underwritten character, and Feig and Coffey are a lot of fun in supporting roles, but many of the rest of the cast struggle to really provide much in the way of convincing characterization. Something along the same lines of this same plot conceit was revisited many years later in Innocence, a film which, despite its overall lackluster treatment of many of these same tropes, at least occasionally managed to muster up a bit of mood. Unfortunately, the only mood Zombie High engenders is one that will make most viewers feel like turning it off.

Zombie High Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Zombie High is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. Parts of Zombie High look quite good indeed, with above average sharpness and clarity, a well resolved grain field, decent detail levels and a nicely saturated palette. But this is an inconsistent presentation which also features a color space occasionally skewed toward yellow (as can be seen in several screenshots), as well as recurrent issues with the perhaps interlinked phenomena of (at times admittedly heavy) grain field resolution and compression. These issues often overlay either a splotchy yellow set of clumps or multicolored speckling which can seriously detract from the underlying image (for examples, see screenshots 8, 12, 16 and 17).

Zombie High Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Zombie High features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track which, like the video element, can be a bit inconsistent at time. The film's song score, which is hardly Oscar bait to begin with, is delivered forcefully enough, as are some quasi-classical cues (music plays a part in the plot, such as it is). Dialogue is unevenly prioritized and even mixed at times, though, with amplitude levels varying surprisingly widely between scenes.

Zombie High Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 1:05)

Zombie High Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Contrasting the damsel in distress approach that iconic films like Rosemary's Baby took versus the ham handed attempts in Zombie High is an object lesson in how to properly structure a film so that the audience is left in the same "predicament" as the heroine. In Rosemary's Baby, the viewer is more or less "one" with Rosemary as she slowly comes to believe she's part of a horrifying conspiracy. In Zombie High, the perspective simply shifts inexplicably at times away from Andrea, divvying up too much information too early and therefore defeating any sense of suspense. Fans of Madsen or even Feig may find this enough of a curio to check out, but this is one high school which gets a pretty resounding D-.