It’s a movie about zombies!

Today’s movie of choice is Unhuman, a zombie flick with teenagers and where are you going? Don’t turn off this review my friend, you’re going to want to hear me out on this. Okay, so Unhuman sounds like a cookie cutter teen zombie flick and for about the first half hour or so it is, but trust me you’re going to want to watch this if you were looking for something interesting in the genre. Remember how films like One Cut of the Dead and The Dead Don’t Die went completely off the rails at a few times through the film? It’s like that, but not those plots.

Unhuman was directed by Marcus Dunstan, the guy who wrote the Feast movies, Saw 4-6, Crazy Fury and Naked Baby…or was it Naked Fury and Crazy Baby. That’s not important. What is important is that he knows his horror comedy movies. The film stars Ever (Brianne Tju), your average high school girl who is a nerd and also kind of a geek. She made her acting debut in everyone’s favorite western anime Cory in the House. She also had a starring role in that 2021 I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot series.

Ever’s goes on a school trip with her best friend Tamra (Ali Gallo) along with a cast of characters that are high school stereotypes. You have the typical jock Danny (Uriah Shelton) and Hunt (CJ LeBlanc), the girlfriend of the jock Jacey (Lo Graham), the bullied dweebs Randall (Benjamin Wadsworth) and Steven (Drew Scheid). And then there’s the brace face nerd Candace (Lucy Burvant), and some various other nerds like Zits (Tyler Galpin),m Slenderman (Angel Lia Spitale), Wagoner (Devin Stovall), and Band Kid (Dontez Williams). These characters are treated so poorly that the film left them uncredited.

Fun fact for How About Notflix fans; Uriah Shelton played Booker Strode in HBN favorite Freaky. Uriah Shelton played Josh Matthews on Girl Meets World. If you recognize Peter Giles’ voice from somewhere, the guy has done a lot of various voice acting gigs in a lot of different video games.

Much like the rickety bus that crashes with the students on board, the movie doesn’t seem to support its own weight. There’s concepts and themes and lessons that it’s building up to but then the plot loses itself. I went from kinda bored to intrigued when the twist happens to progressively more bored as the film went on. Like a magician who can’t seem to decide if he’s doing legitimate magic or covering up for his lack of magic talent by playing it off as comedy. This isn’t a dig at The Amazing Jonathan, that guy was a beautiful gem to this world.

I have a feeling the third act twist, when we figure out how the zombie apocalypse happened and what led up to it, is when a lot of the audience will turn on this film. Without spoiling anything or hinting at the spoilers, it’s kind of a major letdown. The writers tried something, and it very clearly didn’t work. The ultimate story collapses in on itself, however Brianne Tju is adorable and the actors are all absolutely fine in their roles. Even the ones the studio didn’t feel like crediting.

I give this a very middle of the road Blumhouse score.

Rating: C