Zombeavers

Zombeavers
Directed by	Jordan Rubin
Produced by	Evan Astrowsky Chris Bender Christopher Lemole
Written by	Al Kaplan Jordan Rubin Jon Kaplan
Starring	Rachel Melvin Hutch Dano Cortney Palm Lexi Atkins Bill Burr Jake Weary Peter Gilroy
Music by	Al Kaplan Jon Kaplan
Cinematography	Jonathan Hall
Edited by	Ed Marx Seth Flaum
Production company	Armory Films BenderSpink
Release dates	April 13, 2014 (2014-04-13) (Imagine Film Festival)
Running time	85 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$14,947[1]

Zombeavers is a horror comedy movie directed by Jordan Rubin,^[2] based on a script by Al Kaplan, Jordan Rubin and Jon Kaplan.^[3] The film follows a group of college kids staying at a riverside cabin that are attacked by a swarm of zombie beavers. A trailer for the film was released in February 2014 and went viral.

The movie had its world premiere on April 19, 2014 at the Tribeca Film Festival.^[4] The movie was released in the U.S. on March 20, 2015. In December 2014 Zombeavers was released on DVD in some countries.

Plot

A couple of truckers are transporting canisters of bio-hazard substance belonging to the MAMARONECK Medical Research Facility when they hit a deer on the road. The impact of the collision causes one of the canisters to fall into the river, where it floats downstream and reaches a beaver dam. At the dam, the canister starts leaking a green-colored gas.

Mary (Rachel Melvin), Zoe (Cortney Palm) and Jenn (Lexi Atkins) travel to the town of Ashwood for the weekend. They plan on staying at Mary's cousin's house. Jenn's boyfriend, Sam (Hutch Dano), has cheated on her, and this trip is meant to help her recover from it. The house is facing a lake which incidentally also has a beaver dam. The river into which the canister fell is right next to the lake separated by an isthmus. Jenn and Zoe soon realize there is no mobile network in the vicinity, but Mary informs them that there is a landline connection in case anything goes bad.

The girls decide to take a swim in the lake and come across the beaver dam. Jenn wants to see a beaver, so she goes towards the beaver dam, and notices another beaver dam (the place where the canister arrived) in the river and Mary deduces that the same beaver built both dams. There they meet Smyth (Rex Linn), a redneck who saves them from a bear, warns them to stay away from the beavers, and dress more appropriately. Later at night, Tommy (Jake Weary), Mary's boyfriend, Buck (Peter Gilroy), Zoe's boyfriend, and Sam surprise the girls by visiting the house. Mary reluctantly invites the boys inside after Jenn says she's okay with it. Tommy and Mary leave to have sex and Buck and Zoe go to have sex in their own bedroom while Jenn goes to the bathroom to take shower, where she is attacked by a beaver. Tommy kills the beaver with a baseball bat, but Jenn and Mary feel something is wrong with the beaver since it did not have pupils. It is later revealed that the beaver survived.

The group goes out to take a swim in the lake the next day. Jenn, still scared from the previous night's incident, does not join them. It is revealed at this point that Sam had cheated on Jenn with Mary, and everybody other than Tommy and Jenn knew about it. The beavers attack Buck and bite his foot off, scratching Tommy in the process. Jenn is attacked by the same beaver which attacked her the previous night. She impales the beaver with a knife, but not before it scratches her leg. The beavers damage the landline connection, and the group has no way to communicate with outside world.

Zombie beavers surround the house, and Buck has lost a lot of blood. Realizing that Buck will not make it through the night, Tommy decides to take him to hospital using Mary's car along with Zoe. The beavers bring down a tree to block the road, and Tommy goes on foot to find some help, but is killed when the beavers bring down a tree on top of him. Smyth again comes to the rescue and agrees to help them reach the house in his truck. Back at the house, Mary, Sam, and Jenn seal all the windows and the door with wood to keep the beavers out, preventing them from letting Zoe, Smyth and Buck in. Zoe and her group go to Winston Gregorson's (Brent Briscoe) house, where he lives with his wife Myrne Gregorson (Phyllis Katz). Once there they find the Gregorsons dead and their landline connection also destroyed by the beavers.

While at the other house, Jenn turns into a beaver like-zombie as a result of her scratch. She grows a tail and her teeth elongate to beaver-like length. She attacks Mary, and some of her saliva falls into Mary's mouth. Sam rescues Mary by hitting Jenn from behind, and they lock themselves inside a room. Mary realizes if somebody is bitten or scratched by the zombie beavers they turn into beaver-like zombie. In the Gregorsons' house Buck kills Smyth and attacks Zoe, succumbing to his zombie wound. Zoe locks herself in the Gregorsons' bedroom and is attacked by zombified Myrne Gregorson. She is forced to escape by jumping through the window, where she loses consciousness. Meanwhile, a beaver accidentally sets the other house on fire and Jenn succeeds in killing zombie Sam.

Now bloodied, Zoe returns to help Mary in Smyth's truck. Smyth, now zombified, shoots at the truck, but they manage to survive. Jenn attempts to jump on top of the truck, but is run over. She survives the impact, and together Mary and Zoe reach the spot where Tommy had died and turned into a zombie. With the road blocked by a tree, they decide to walk. Believing that Zoe is bitten, Mary points the gun at her, but instead starts to turn into zombie. Zoe kills her with an axe and walks away. On the road she sees the same truckers who had dropped the canister, and they run over her accidentally.

In a post-credits scene, a bee is seen flying away from one of zombie's carcass and returning to the hive in a zombified state.

Cast

• Rachel Melvin as Mary
• Cortney Palm as Zoe
• Lexi Atkins as Jenn
• Hutch Dano as Sam
• Jake Weary as Tommy
• Peter Gilroy as Buck
• Bill Burr as Joseph
• Rex Linn as Smyth
• Brent Briscoe as Winston Gregorson
• Phyllis Katz as Myrne Gregorson
• Robert R. Shafer as Trucker
• Chad Anderson as Adam
• Jamie, David and Eoin as The Debauchery Beavers

Production

Al Kaplan, Jordan Rubin, and Jon Kaplan began working on the script for Zombeavers in 2012.^[5] Al Kaplan suggested the title Zombeavers to Rubin, who loved it and proposed that they write the film.^[6] Rubin then put together a proof of concept trailer compiled from footage from various horror movies, BBC nature shows, and social media outlets and presented the trailer to BenderSpink and Armory Films.^[7] The two companies agreed to finance the film and the movie went into pre-production shortly thereafter. The film features animatronic models of beavers as opposed to CGI special effects, and the models were created by Creature Effects.^[5] Actresses Cortney Palm, Rachel Melvin, and Lexi Atkins, along with comedian/actor Bill Burr, were all confirmed to be performing in the film.^[8] Principal photography took place in Santa Clarita, California at the Disney Ranch over a period of 21 days and with a small budget.^[9]

Epic Pictures Group uploaded the first official trailer for the movie on February 6, 2014,^[10] and the trailer quickly went viral, amassing over a million views in less than a week.^[11] The same month the production company also created several movie posters parodying Oscar Award nominated films Gravity, American Hustle, and Her.^[12]

Reception

Brent McKnight of giantfreakinrobot said, "It's as much of a blast as you could hope for."^[13] Rob Hunter of Film School Rejects called the movie "funny, smart, consistently entertaining,"^[14] and Jason Gorber of Twitch Film "commend[s] its tenacious nature to mine every last drop of narrative and complexity out of a very slight but very funny idea."^[15] On the other hand, Variety gave Zombeavers a mostly negative review, commenting that "this debut feature for standup and sketch-comedy vet Rubin is not without flashes of ingenuity, but the one-joke premise wears thin even before the mercifully brief 76-minute running time is up." However, the critic adds that "Zombeavers is not a total wash, and seen at night, under the right combination of low expectations and controlled substances, it may even seem better than it really is."^[16] The Los Angeles Times was ambivalent as they felt that the movie was "a fun idea and, like a good undead animal, has some solid designs on hitting its target" but that this "doesn't necessarily save the experience of watching the film from being anything other than hairy."^[17]

Box Office

"Zombeavers" opened in 25th place in Austria for the weekend of November 7–9, 2014, grossing $11,293 from 23 theaters. The movie opened in the United States on March 20, 2015, and ended the weekend with a 63rd place finish grossing $8,163 from eleven screens. As of April 5, 2015, the domestic total is $14,947 and the international total is $29,133 giving them worldwide total of $44,080.^[1]

Soundtrack

The Official Soundtrack (OST) was composed by Al Kaplan and Jon Kaplan & featured songs from the Kaplan brothers band Legolambs.^[18] The Soundtrack will release in the spring of 2015 over La-La Land Records.^[18]

References

External links

• Official website
• Zombeavers at the Internet Movie Database
• Zombeavers at Rotten Tomatoes