When Is a Zombie Movie Not a Zombie Movie?
Zombie High (1987) has no flesh-rotting or brain-munching in the traditional sense, but one can easily forgive the ironic misnomer.
These so-called so-cal Zombies are actually an excuse for some aggressive subtext about obedience, conformity, and having your sense of self slowly Stepforded by institutions pretending to improve you. Which can be much scarier, frankly. If it applies itself.
What you get here is a high-gloss teen dramedy with a solid camp B-movie chops. Zombie High is about as 1987 as you get – it’s all new wave haircuts, valley-speak dialogue, and power-chord soundtrack mojo. Virginia Madsen stars as a scholarship student who starts to notice that the prep school she’s been accepted into might be doing more than just moulding young minds.
The rest of the roll call includes a young Sherilyn Fenn who steals every scene that isn’t nailed down. Richard Cox plays the kind of skeevy authority figure who probably keeps framed photos of Reagan and Roger Daltrey in his office and and Paul Feig – yes, mister Paul Feig, turns up to steal Jon Cryer’s lunch.
And yet it remains generally under-appreciated and under-achieving in cult class.
You can tell it understood the assignment, but it doesn’t get the marks that Heathers or They Live would score a year or so later. It’s definitely sniffing around the same locker room, though. There’s something vaguely counter-authority simmering under the surface – but it isn’t self-aware enough to care.
Zombie High is pure plastic prep school dystopia, and the whole thing carries that strange tension between rebellion and conformity that only really makes sense if you were a teenager in the ’80s.
Some of the humour is intentional. Some of it isn’t. It’s hard to tell which is which, and that ambiguity is one of the things I love most about it. But audiences haven’t generally been as kind. I get it. I like schlock, so my radar isn’t always calibrated for quality.
It never quite became a cult classic – not in the way it clearly wanted to. But for a slim group of people raised on Creepshow, Billy Idol videos, and suspiciously moralistic horror anthologies, this one makes sense. It scratches an itch.
The film feels like an MTV version of an EC Comic. It flirts with satire, dabbles in horror, and sits awkwardly on the shelf between The Breakfast Club and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.
This one’s for the inner 17-year-old who still thinks adults are the real monsters. -Pop