Destroy All Monsters: ZOMBEAVERS, Or How The Final Girl Got Knocked On Her Tail

Spoiler warning for Zombeavers.

You get what you pay for with a movie called Zombeavers - or you'd better get it, otherwise why did you pay for it?

It must suck to be a "Neologism Title" movie (for which the Sharknado trilogy sets the bar very low), because the only thing we're asking, as an audience, is that the movie somehow live up to the whackshit image that the mashed-together syllables of the name immediately conjured in our head. What do you see in your mind's eye when you see the word Zombeavers?

My particular brain chemistry immediately goes to zombie beavers and vagina jokes, of which Zombeavers delivers in plenty. It also, either on purpose or because everyone making the film was too high to know the difference, demolishes the Final Girl paradigm so spectacularly that I've watched the film twice since the weekend. Zombeavers is a lot of things, but it's also one thing I never would have expected: it's refreshing!

Zombeavers opens with three girls in a car on their way to a weekend getaway at a cabin on a lake. They immediately fall into easily-identifiable horror movie Types:

Jenn is clearly the Final Girl. She's blonde, American as apple pie, virginal-looking, and heartbroken. Her boyfriend was recently Instagrammed cheating on her, and we meet her before any of the others, crying into her smartphone in a gas station bathroom.

Jenn is the only one of the group who speaks with any identifiable earnestness (which sticks out like a broken beaver tail in these particular climes, with every other character either a wiseass or a wild pastiche). She is taking life, and this story, seriously. Jenn is also the only character, in screenwriting terms, with somewhere to go.

Mary is the Best Friend. The friends are visiting her cabin; Mary is high-strung; she's set a bunch of rules for the weekend like No Boys and No Cell Phones and BFFs Forever. She isn't an idiot, thank goodness, and seems (at least at first) to be trying to do the right thing. But her performance is broadly caricaturized, halfway between Alison from Orphan Black and Marie from Breaking Bad.

Out of focus in the back seat of the car is Zoe - who, in the horror movie view of the world, is the Slut. Zoe is deliberately awful in this introductory scene: whining about having no access to her boyfriend for the weekend, cooing mercilessly into her pet dog's face, flipping through dick pics on her phone, and wondering aloud whether they've discovered electricity where they're going.

In the horror movie schematic, Zoe has a target painted on her from the moment we meet her. This is an exploitation movie, and she's the exploitation. She's here to provide value twice: first as a piece of ass, and later as a piece of meat.

To reinforce the point, as soon as the girls get to the lake and change into their bikinis, Zoe hollers "All right, let's get naked!" and promptly doffs her top. The camera holds on the medium close-up long and lasciviously enough to declare Yes, These Are Tits. This is, after all, the movie we've paid to see.

But something's off in Cortney Palm's performance - maybe she didn't get the memo? - because the unabashed, "what the fuck is the big deal?" confidence with which she drops the top immediately begins to reverberate against anyone else in the movie who comes along and has a problem with what she's done - or anything else she's doing, really.

Mary is annoyed with her brazenness, and a local hunter man takes pains to point out that all the girls' beachwear are too much nudity for the wholesome families that live nearby. It all just starts to sound exactly like what it is: a bunch of prudish high-handedness that would have been perfectly at place in the slasher movies of the '70s and '80s, and has aged about as well as those movies have. There's pre-Scream and post-Scream, and post-Scream, we know that these movies are all just thinly-veiled conservative propaganda for the demonization of natural human behaviour. Call 'em sins if you want to, but in that case, I'm with Mal Reynolds: a fan of all seven.

So is Zoe, clearly, who also sets herself apart from the others by baldly declaring her own value (she confidently asserts that her boyfriend would never cheat on her - because why would anyone?) and claiming her own pleasure (when the boyfriends inevitably show up at the cabin, and Sex Round One has just concluded, Zoe immediately demands "More!" - because, well, sex is good, right?).

Then the Zombeavers show up, and everyone heads off toward their genre-defined destinies. Jenn, the presumptive Final Girl, runs into the cabin alone and faces the first reincarnated beaver, fighting it to the death on the kitchen counter, where it grasps and claws its way towards her exposed... uh... beaver, because this is the movie we've paid to see.

And Zoe, the one with the proverbial target on her back, heads off to try to get her boyfriend to a hospital via the Only Road Back To Town, in a telegraphed trope that spells a single word: "DOOM." Remember what happened to Thor in Cabin in the Woods?

But Zoe just sort of forgets to die, or the movie forgets to kill her. The others get picked off, one by one; and Zoe just keeps going.

It's as though the sole survivor of Aliens were Hudson, the audience-favourite wiseass, instead of Ripley, the hero. Our "hero" here, Jenn, wanders into a bedroom with Mary... but before the midnight audience can yell "make out!," Jenn's broken the would-be lesbian love scene in half by turning into a human-zombeaver hybrid, and trying to kill her friend.

It's a one-two punch: the "are they gonna go there?" of the girl-on-girl scene redirected immediately into the "shit, they went there?" of pulling a Psycho with the movie's main character.

I suppose the first line of insight into Jenn's true place in the story is Sam, her cheating ex-boyfriend. When he arrives at the lake, he isn't some misunderstood heartthrob as befits his connection to a Final Girl; he's just an actual asshole, an emo twerp coward who degenerates as the movie goes along, rather than becoming more courageous, until he literally dies by getting his dick bitten off, along with half the male audience.

Zoe, on the other hand, does become more courageous. More accurately, the person she's been all along is very clearly shown to be the person most capable of getting herself out of this nonsense. By the time she's stumbling down the Only Road Back To Town again at the end of the movie, in her short-shorts and shit-kicker boots, with streams of blood running down her skin and carrying a Prometheus-sized axe, she hasn't transformed into someone else so much as fully validated who she is.

It's a gleefully ballsy move from a movie this ridiculous: daring to suggest that that girl, the obnoxious one you'd steer clear of at the movie theatre, might have an interior life of her own - and just as much reason to, or interest in, surviving as anyone else. Of course she would! She's the only character who was enjoying life in the first place.

Destroy All Monsters is a weekly column on Hollywood and pop culture. Matt Brown is in Toronto and on twitter.