How about zombies for Christmas?
Holiday musical dead on its feet
Consider it an early Christmas gift: Anna and the Apocalypse is the zombie horror holiday musical you didn’t know you needed.
Just imagining that first pitch meeting is entertainment in itself.
“It’s High School Musical meets World War Z! No no, it’s Glee meets Shaun of the Dead! Hold on... it’s Christmas! OK, Love Actually meets The Walking Dead!”
Whatever its cinematic antecedents, Anna, which boasts an appealing cast of fresh-faced newcomers and a quirky Scottish sensibility, is charming, clever, and unexpectedly moving, too.
The film, directed by John McPhail with catchy original songs by Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly, has a sad backstory. It’s based on a BAFTA-winning short film, Zombie Musical, by Ryan McHenry, who died at age 27 of cancer in 2015 just as his project was on the way to becoming a feature film.
The new film has the undeniable asset of Ella Hunt in the lead role, charismatic and touching as teen heroine Anna. At 18, Anna is ready to graduate high school in her small Scottish town of Little Haven, and keen to experience the world. As we begin, she’s informing her dad (the perfectly cast Mark Benton), who’s raising her alone, that she plans to postpone university and travel to Australia. He is NOT amused.
Dad’s the janitor at Anna’s high school, which is run by a misfit headmaster, Savage (Paul Kaye). The first part of the movie – we’ll call it the High School Musical section – introduces us to the typical slate of teen characters and their struggles.
What they don’t expect is, um, a zombie apocalypse. It happens suddenly one day. Heading out of the house, Anna puts her headphones in and sings cheerfully of a beautiful new morning. “What a time to be alive,” she sings, and dances, oblivious to the murderous zombie mayhem happening in the suburban streets around her.
Finally Anna and friend John, also dancing away the morning, meet up in a playground, where they have a head-spinning encounter with a zombie dressed as a snowman. Panicked, they head to the bowling alley where they both work. There, alas, they find a lot more zombies. The dialogue can be quite funny, as when the teens contemplate the fate of their favourite celebrities.
The latter part of the film becomes a more traditional zombie narrative, a fight to the death for our band of teenagers seeking to escape the deadly bite and reunite with loved ones, if they’re alive.