THIS IS NOT A TEST Review: Could It Be Time to Hold Off On Zombie Movies For a Bit?

Serious question: is it possible to have too many zombie movies and kind of become desensitized to them as a result?

It seems like we get a chance to find out, since new zombie-adjacent outings just keep on coming the past couple of months – from the year kicking off with We Bury the Dead, continuing with the second installment of 28 Years Later, The Bone Temple, and now, less than a month later, giving us an adaptation of Courtney Summers’ YA bestseller, This Is Not a Test.

Adam MacDonald’s film follows the initial setup of Summers’ book pretty closely. Five teenagers (six in the original) find refuge inside their school after a zombie outbreak takes over their small town. The origin of this particular apocalypse remains unknown, but the rules are familiar: the zombies can be killed by targeting their heads, and whoever gets bitten is now infected. Also, these versions of zombies are fast, 28 Days Later-style.

Out of the five teens, we mostly follow Sloane (Olivia Holt), a girl coming from an abusive home, who starts the film contemplating suicide. The zombie plague doesn’t immediately change Olivia’s stark worldview or provide perspective, especially since there is always a potential conflict brewing within the group.

Cary (Corteon Moore) becomes the unofficial leader, faced with tough decisions, while Trace (Carson MacCormac) questions his authority and holds a grudge for some of the choices that Cary made. Trace’s sister, Grace (Chloe Avakian), wants to support her brother, but ends up making eyes at Cary. And Rhys (Froy Gutierrez) is there to be a genuinely nice guy and try to connect with Sloane.

One of the major issues that plagues This Is Not a Test stems from Adam MacDonald’s script seemingly striving to emulate the introspective prose of the original book. Courtney Summers, the author of Sadie and Cracked Up to Be, specializes in using external circumstances to dissect teenage experience and expose it as a mostly gruesome affair. But as we all know, what tends to work on the page doesn’t necessarily translate well onto the screen, and MacDonald’s film ends up being a prime example of that.

While the movie at first jumps right into the action, for the majority of its runtime, it doesn’t really have much of a plot. The characters more or less keep hanging out, forced together by unfortunate circumstances, and it’s not until the third act that their actions start having actual consequences.

MacDonald, who has gained solid horror expertise, having directed Pyewacket, as well as episodes of Slasher and Hell Motel, tries really hard to make the whole experience more cinematically interesting by employing POV shots of heads being bashed in and blood splattering, deep focus shots, and a few impressive jump scares. Unfortunately, none of this is anything we haven’t seen before.

Significant effort also extends to the core five cast, all of whom are also proficient in the genre and do their best to make their characters feel lived in. If only the script allowed them to be actual characters, but sadly, that part didn’t translate well from page to screen either. This is especially daunting in the case of Sloane, who, despite what we’ve been told by our therapists time and again, remains the sum of all her traumas and not much else.

All of this kind of renders the film a moot point. Sure, zombies remain an effective conduit of social and psychological metaphors. And if you squint hard enough, you can see the glimpses of the book’s subliminal ideas about coming of age being akin to surviving the apocalypse, and the human need for perseverance potentially overriding severe trauma.

In all honesty, though, all of these ideas seemed considerably fresher in 2012, when Summers’ novel was originally published. So, in the end, what we are left with is yet another serious question. Should we give zombies a rest for a bit, at least until we come up with something to say worth resurrecting them for?

The film is now playing in select theaters, via Independent Film Company and Shudder.