Taglines: Oh the weather outside is frightful..
The film starts in the small town of Little Haven, England. Anna Shepard (Ella Hunt) is being driven to school by her father Tony (Mark Benton) along with her best friend John (Malcolm Cumming). Anna turns off the radio as a news report airs on the outbreak of a possibly deadly virus. John accidentally lets it slip in front of Tony that Anna is planning to go traveling instead of attending university after high school. Once they get to school, Tony tries to talk to Anna, but messes up when he brings up her deceased mother. Anna coldly tells Tony she can’t wait to get away from him.
In school, we meet American exchange student Steph (Sarah Swire), whose car keys are confiscated by the sadistic new headmaster Arthur Savage (Paul Kaye) since she parked on school property. John is seen getting bullied when he’s not around Anna. All three of them express a desire to get away from their current lives in song (“Break Away”). Anna goes into the auditorium to meet her friend Lisa (Marli Siu), who is performing in the school Christmas show that Savage is directing. He is utterly obnoxious to the students and is nearly knocked offstage by a falling star prop.
During lunch, Anna and John sit with Lisa and her boyfriend Chris (Christopher Leveaux), and the two can’t keep their faces off each other. They watch as Anna’s douche ex-boyfriend Nick (Ben Wiggins) looks at her. Chris and Lisa know that John is in love with Anna, so they try and change the subject. John starts to sing about how someone like Anna probably won’t see him the way he sees her (“Hollywood Ending”).
Afterwards, Anna finds Steph outside trying to get into her car. Anna tries to be helpful, but Steph drives her away when she accidentally tells her “At least you don’t have a mother that nags you”, since Steph was essentially dropped off in Little Haven while her parents are vacationing in Mexico, which she believes to be because they can’t handle that she is a lesbian. As Anna walks away, she brushes up against a zombie.
The school holds the show that night while Anna and Chris work at the bowling alley. Lisa sings a highly suggestive song that shocks the other parents (“It’s That Time of Year”). She is disappointed to find that Chris did not make it, but his grandmother did. Savage watches the display from his booth with Tony, who is the school’s janitor. Savage attempts to rush to the stage to stop the song, but Lisa manages to finish. Outside, a zombie is attempting to break into the school. Savage warns them to go away, or else. When the zombie keeps banging, Savage opens the doors but finds nobody outside.
In the morning, Anna decides to put on a positive attitude and embrace the day… all while the zombie apocalypse is happening around her, and she fails to notice the chaos since she is singing (“Turning My Life Around”). John joins in the song as the two meet at the cemetery. They make their way to a playground when they are spotted by a zombie dressed as a snowman. When they realize what is going on, Anna lures the zombie near her as she waits by a seesaw, and then uses it to whack the zombie’s head off and causing John to scream like a girl.
Anna and John decide to head to the bowling alley for safety. They find Chris and Steph there, but Anna and Chris’s boss has become a zombie. They kill her just moments before a whole horde of zombies starts to break in. Using bowling balls, pins, and a spatula, among other things, the friends kill off the zombies one by one. They then attempt to reach their loved ones, but find that they have no reception.
Meanwhile, Tony, Lisa, Chris’s gran, and other adults are stuck at the school. Lisa tends to Chris’s gran since she has a bad heart. Savage, however, wants everyone to listen to him, but nobody will since he’s such a prick. Anna and her friends stay at the bowling alley as it gets dark and watch as the army firebombs the town while they wish in song they had their loved ones close (“Human Voice”).
Anna and the Apocalypse is a 2017 Christmas zombie musical film directed by John McPhail and with a screenplay by Alan McDonald and Ryan McHenry based on McHenry’s 2010 BAFTA-winning short Zombie Musical. The film premiered at Fantastic Fest on September 22, 2017. Orion Pictures released the film in the United States on 30 November 2018.
Film Review for Anna and the Apocalypse
Comedy and horror are such strange bedfellows. As an odd couple, they’ve spawned movies like Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein,” Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” and Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” Except for perhaps Burton’s adaptation of the Broadway show “Sweeny Todd” and Frank Oz’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” few movies in this Frankensteined subgenre have gone so far as to put on the ritz as boldly as John McPhail’s Christmas-themed zombie comedy, “Anna and the Apocalypse.”
The Anna (Ella Hunt) of the title is an adventurous high school senior looking forward to taking a gap year before college to see the world outside her home in Scotland—if her overprotective dad (Mark Benton) doesn’t get in the way of her plans. After school, she works in a bowling alley with her best friend John (Malcolm Cumming), who mostly keeps his feelings for her at bay. The two are friends with a set of lovebirds, Chris (Christopher Leveaux) and Lisa (Marli Siu), and unknowingly share their schoolyard disenchantment with the campus’ resident activist, Steph (Sarah Swire), an American student just dumped by her girlfriend and whose parents have left her alone for Christmas.
But by the next morning, their ho-hum spirits feel like a moot point in the wake of the zombie apocalypse. Anna and John encounter their first monster on their way to school and decide to take shelter back at their bowling alley, where they run into Chris and Steph. The audience and performers in the school’s Christmas show—which includes Anna’s dad and Lise—lock themselves in the cafeteria at the command of the uptight principal, Savage (Paul Kaye). Now, the group must reunite with their loved ones at school before it’s too late.
“Anna and the Apocalypse” shares much in common with Edgar Wright’s breakout zombie comedy, “Shaun of the Dead.” Each movie revels in the grotesque task of killing zombies, setting up comical ways for our heroes to fight back with vinyl records or pointy lawn ornaments. The scene where Anna puts in her headphones for an upbeat musical number as zombies tear through her neighborhood resembles the morning after the scene when Shaun repeats his morning routine without noticing zombies have eaten his neighbors and likely the convenience store clerk. McPhail also includes one quickly edited montage of the group getting into a car and driving away as a stylistic nod to Wright’s frenetic cuts.
The movie’s many pop songs add to that energetic spirit. Like a scrappier, naughtier “High School Musical,” the teens will sing about not fitting in, not having their feelings reciprocated. At times, the transitions to verse are a little rough, but some of the numbers are so bizarre, it’s easy to laugh. In one song, the principal chides students for tweeting their every empty thought, in another, a group of bullies kill zombies as they’re belting out a masculine tune. For Lisa’s Christmas show performance, she sings a filthy song so full of double entendres, it might have made Ernst Lubitsch proud. Of course, that’s not all she has in store, as mid-way through her song, six shirtless men in red shorts and suspenders flank her to drive home her number’s sexual overtones.
The playful spirit of “Anna and the Apocalypse” extends to its cinematography, where it swings wildly from colorful spaces like the Christmas show stage to the greyest shade of grim outside during the zombie invasion. Those visual contrasts amp up the already odd coupling of death, destruction, high kicks and high notes. In a saner movie, those two different color palettes may have looked too jarring but it works in the movie to play up the chaos—much of which takes place off-screen or in quick doctored shots of the town. What the movie lacks in budget, it makes up with spunk.
How many other Christmas-themed horror comedy musicals have such catchy songs, smart jokes sprinkled throughout suspenseful moments, and an ensemble dedicated to pulling it off? “Anna and the Apocalypse” is a gift for the midnight movie crowd that’s just as liable to break out into song as to celebrate each major zombie kill. It’s one of those rare horror movies to leave you with good holiday cheer.
Anna and the Apocalypse (2018)
Directed by: John McPhail
Starring: Ella Hunt, Malcolm Cumming, Sarah Swire, Christopher Leveaux, Ben Wiggins, Marli Siu, Mark Benton, Ella Jarvis, Euan Bennet, Tariqsafdar Hussain, Janet Lawson, Janet Lawson
Screenplay by: Alan McDonald, Ryan McHenry
Production Design by: Ryan Clachrie
Cinematography by: Sara Deane
Film Editing by: Mark Hermida
Costume Design by: Fi Morrison
Art Direction by: Martin Kelly
Music by: Roddy Hart, Tommy Reilly
MPAA Rating: R for zombie violence and gore, language, and some sexual material.
Distributed by: Orion Pictures
Release Date: November 30, 2018
Visits: 103
