Director – Peter Lepeniotis, Screenplay – Peter Lepeniotis, Michael Samonek & Michael Schwartz, Based on the Novel Zombie Town (2000) by R.L. Stine, Producer – John Gillespie, Photography – Rudolf Blahacek, Music – Ryan Shore, Visual Effects – Nick Fairhead, Special Effects – FX North (Supervisor – Max MacDonald), Makeup Effects Designer – Randy Daudlin, Production Design – Mark Kowalsky. Production Company – Trimuse Entertainment/Viva Pictures/Now Entertainment Group/Toonz Entertainment/Lookout Entertainment.
Cast
Marlon Kazadi (Mike Broadstreet), Madi Monroe (Amy Maxwell), Dan Aykroyd (Len Carver), Henry Czerny (Richard Landro), Breanna Coates (Ms. Bonnard), Bruce McCulloch (Officer Jenkins), Chevy Chase (Mezmerian), Chatrisse Dolabaille (Mike’s Mom), Scott Thompson (Andy), Mikel Conde (Dean Jenkins), Jonas Goddard Lashbrook (Cray), Ryan Mauro (Dimp), Callan Potter (Chad), R.L. Stine (Himself)
Plot
The town of Carverville, home of the world famous horror director Len Carver, gears up to host the premiere of first horror film that Carver has made in 35 years. Teenager Mike Broadstreet works as a projectionist at The Grand Theater where the premiere will be held but hates zombie and horror films. Mike invites Amy Maxwell, the girl he is interested in, to the theatre and she begs him to screen the film in advance for her. However, doing so releases energy that is inside the film. Mike and Amy shield themselves with the film cans but the energy goes out and infects the town. Mike and Amy emerge to find that the townspeople have been turned into zombies.
R.L. Stine needs little introduction as the hugely successful author of horror stories written for kids. Stine has published over 400 books in this vein since 1986, the most well-known of which are the massively popular Goosebumps series, which runs to well over 200 books, along with other series such as the Fear Street and The Nightmare Room books. He is considered the most popular children’s author of all time. There have been numerous films and tv series based on Stine’s work (see bottom of the page). The film here is based on Zombie Town (2000), one of Stine’s few standalone books.
I hate the works of R.L. Stine – they are the horror movie equivalent of decaffeinated coffee or alcohol-free beer. Stine calls them ‘safe horror’ meaning that they are works where all that was monstrous and exciting to a previous era is rendered down around the level of a children’s story and offers a boo that is little more threatening that someone wearing a sheet pretending to be a ghost. And from the moment it opens, Zombie Town is exactly that. Everything about it looks bland, formulaic and utterly anodyne.
Zombie Town is horror that has had everything that is scary wrung out of it. If you had to make an analogy you could call it Messiah of Evil (1973) remade for the Disney Channel and given all the formula that comes with that – teen leads, an adequate amount of representation, and a requisite cameo from R.L. Stine (via webcam) at the very end. A perfect example is the fact that this is meant to be a Zombie Film. Modern, post-George Romero zombies are undead and devour the flesh of others, whereas the zombies here are merely possessed and don’t do any flesh devouring – at most their eyes light up and they suck out people’s souls akin to the creatures in Lifeforce (1985).
( to r) Henry Czerny, film director Len Carver (Dan Akyroyd) and teenage projectionist Mike Broadstreet (Marlon Kazadi)
The plot centres around Dan Aykroyd’s film director having trapped people and their souls inside the films he directs – this is something the film takes an astonishingly casual attitude towards. For someone to know that what he does can have this effect and yet to keep on making films suggests a person with a callous or cruel disregard for human life, yet Aykroyd’s character is portrayed as fairly genial throughout. (He also runs away when the heroine is in danger, which is never commented on again). The film ends with the curse of his current film lifted and the townspeople released, but says nothing of the fate of the people trapped inside his other films.
Zombie Town was the first live-action film directed by Canadian director Peter Lepeniotis, who had previously worked in animation with The Nut Job (2014) and Gnome Alone (2017).
R.L. Stine’s works have also been adapted to the screen as the tv anthology series The Nightmare Room (2001-2); the films Superstitious (1999), When Good Ghouls Go Bad (2001) and Mostly Ghostly: Have You Met My Ghoulfriend? (2014); the tv series Eye Candy (2015); the big-screen film Goosebumps (2015) and its sequel Goosebumps 2 (2018); and the film trilogy Fear Street 1994 (2021), Fear Street 1978 (2021) and Fear Street 1666 (2021).
