I get conceptually what this niche this movie is trying to fill. It’s a scary movie for kids, much in the same way that Roald Dahl is writing creepypasta for adults and Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark and Friday Night at Freddy’s (the “sleeper hit” Tarot, the indie Australian hit Talk to Me, the as yet unseen Netflix What’s Inside) are doing whatever they’re doing to get young people to stop huffing coolant and eating Tide pods for long enough to sit sing vape through a 90 minute movie. I can see how getting the guy who wrote Hellraiser and Candyman to write a script that included references to some beloved classic horror films (Alien, Exorcist, Jurassic Park, Gremlins, Night of the Living… never mind) for parents, some viral cultural references for the Moo Deng fans of the world, and then a really, really neon color palette for all the children who need visual confirmation that this movie is for them might have worked if everyone was trying their best, but this really isn’t anyone’s best.
The animation feels cheap, like someone put all the models through a single round of rendering and spit out the blockiest dead-eyed animals that no budget could buy. David Harbour’s decision to do this movie feels like a cry for help beyond just the very recent public meltdown of his marriage. Paul Sun-Hyung Lee of Kim’s Convenience and Star Wars fame has an amazing role as an anti-hero Felix. For some reason this film after its opening weekend has a 90% + on RT. It’s trying to do some of the clever fourth-wall breaking that goes on in Rango (2011), which I continue to maintain is one of the best contemporary children’s films of all time (suck on that, Paddington Bear). But the meta commentary on the plot and structure of camp horror films while at times fun tends toward lazy rather than high-brow humor, a means of shuffling the story along without actually having a plot, because what really are the stakes in a movie where a bunch of petting zoo animals contract a zombie disease overnight? Like, is that ultimately that bad?
Probably what Night of the Zoopocalypse does best is teach you how not to do horror through sound. What I thought at first was an intentional decision to tone down the number of jump scares through the use of muted music quickly became the realization that there really isn’t any music at all to build tension or create mood in this movie, and what horror needs more than anything is a score that can cue us to how to allot our attention, otherwise you get stuck in this constant state of hyper awareness about whether or not a bunny is going to pop out of some shelf and try to bite you in the neck or whatever.
If you’re looking for a movie that does horror for kids really well, I continue to go back to Little Monsters with Lupita Nyongo and Josh Gad from 2019. That movie does such a wonderful job of paying homage to the zombie horror tropes while also finding a way to really embrace the kids humor, akin to horror comedy mainstays (read: not camp parodies) like The Cabin in the Woods, The Monkey, or Tucker and Dale vs Evil. One of the indications you can tell that Night of the Zoopocalypse isn’t really interested in telling interesting stories is its climax and ending is a minor plot point of Spirited Away:
