In short: Unhuman (2022)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

The bus harbouring the usual bunch of contemporary high school clichés on a field trap crashes, with an apparent big explosion of blood. The minor injuries incurred thereby will be the least of the kids’ and their cynical idiot teacher’s problems, though, for some mysterious chemical incident does cause a bit of a rage zombie issue. The survivors manage to get into a large, dilapidated building in the woods, where you get a mixture of bad, “psychologically insightful” monologues and some siege action.

Until a particularly idiotic plot twist turns the up until now already pretty terrible movie into something downright insulting. Spoiler: it’s not zombies, but a bizarre, nonsensical plan of the two (male and white, of course, because it’s just that kind of movie) outsider kids to get closer to girls and express their pain (or something equally stupid) going very wrong indeed.

The best thing that can be said about Marcus Dunstan’s Unhuman is that it made me realize how unfairly I have underrated the movies of Christopher Landon until now. This really, really wants to be a Landon-esque mixture of broad, often physical, comedy, bloody horror, social consciousness and serious exploration of teenage emotion, but where Landon is always in control of his material and shows impeccable timing with most of his tonal shifts, Unhuman just wavers from tonal shift to tonal shift, stumbles over the stupidity of its plot, and couldn’t land a joke to save its life.

Of course, to do any of what it attempts successfully, it would need a script – unlike the one it has by Dunstan and Patrick Melton – that includes joke that are actually funny, characters that are more than the most basic clichés interacting in exactly the ways you’d expect, or an idiot plot. The filmmakers certainly aren’t helping their case by bringing up Breakfast Club as a comparison, which only brings the lack of substance and quality in their dialogue to the fore, as well as the lack of young actors playing their asses off.

Also, what’s with all the slow motion?