More gags and gore than a swiss Army knife has blades

Hello, cupcakes! Sweetie G here with a look at Paramount’s new comedy-horror “Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse”.

I loved this film! It has been a loooooooong time since I literally laughed out loud at the cinema and I was still giggling in the car on the way home. If you asked me to pin it down, I’d pitch “Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” somewhere between “American Pie” and “Shaun Of The Dead” with a dash of “Evil Dead” and “The A-Team” thrown in for good measure.

Three friends: Ben (Tye Sheridan), Carter (Logan Miller) and Augie (Joey Morgan) are off for their last Scouting camp-out before two of them leave Scouts. While they’re away in the woods, the unexplained zombie pathogen runs rampant through the city. Over the course of the night the boys team up with sassy high-school dropout Denise (Sarah Dumont) who’s harder than all of them. Together they apply their survival skills (both street and scout) to hilarious and gory effect.  Our motley crew provide us with a teen movie checklist: there’s a romantic crush, an oversexed and under socialised teenage boy and a wholesome and hapless good guy. It’s not an original combination but it’s bloody brilliant (moderate pun intended).

The opening sequence clearly pays homage to “28 Days Later” and sets the tone to the rest of the film. If you laugh at the beginning, you’ll be laughing for the next 90mins. If you’re not laughing though, this might not be the movie for you or, you know, you might want to check your pulse. We’re also introduced to a new(ish) breed of cinema zombie: ones that can retain knowledge of what they used to do when their blood still pumped freely around their body, plus some of the scariest zombies of all – the fast and clever variety!

It’s not often a Horror/ Comedy mix manages the balance between the two genres very well – all too often neither is executed particularly well and the outcome is an all-round disappointment. This time, however, Director Christopher Landon manages a headshot on both counts. The jumpy/ gory horror was on point and the comedy was slapsticky-saucy hilarity. With blood-a-plenty and gratuitous boob jokes, this film isn’t high-brow intellectual fare, but it is belly-laughing, teary-eyed, zombie jumping fun.