More like the Scouts Guide to Crappy Filmmaking. Look, nobody's going into this film with high expectations, but is it too much ask for at least a handful of well-deserved laughs? Scouts Guide could only have been made today. Zombies are all the rage these days (for reasons I can't explain) and there's always room for teen comedies with lots of gross-out humor and sex jokes. You'd think combining both genres into one movie would make sense, but--despite the actors' efforts--Scouts Guide just stumbles from one scene to the next, begging you to care.
Do I even need to explain the story? Three scouts and a stripper, I mean cocktail waitress, join forces to survive the zombie apocalypse. One of them, Ben, is in love with some girl named Kendall and I'm sure they will absolutely not end up together in the end... Honestly, need I say more? Zombie apocalypse, lame jokes, running zombies, running from zombies; the list goes on.
Also, is it too much to ask for the film to stick to its own rules? I know what kind of film we're dealing with here, but the lack of consistency is just annoying, especially when the film tries to generate some actual tension in its action scenes. One moment, the zombies unleash their inner Usain Bolt and in the next, they're standing quietly behind someone, waiting to unleash a cheap jump-scare. And how did this apocalypse even get started to begin with? There's something cool about a zombie movie not wasting time with pointless techno-babble and just trying to be funny, but there was an opportunity here for some ridiculously funny explanation.
And that's Scouts Guide in a nutshell: wasted potential. It's a parody that fails at being a parody. There were countless opportunities for the film to really take apart the zombie genre, to embrace it and mock it simultaneously, but it never rises to the occasion.
Do I even need to explain the story? Three scouts and a stripper, I mean cocktail waitress, join forces to survive the zombie apocalypse. One of them, Ben, is in love with some girl named Kendall and I'm sure they will absolutely not end up together in the end... Honestly, need I say more? Zombie apocalypse, lame jokes, running zombies, running from zombies; the list goes on.
Also, is it too much to ask for the film to stick to its own rules? I know what kind of film we're dealing with here, but the lack of consistency is just annoying, especially when the film tries to generate some actual tension in its action scenes. One moment, the zombies unleash their inner Usain Bolt and in the next, they're standing quietly behind someone, waiting to unleash a cheap jump-scare. And how did this apocalypse even get started to begin with? There's something cool about a zombie movie not wasting time with pointless techno-babble and just trying to be funny, but there was an opportunity here for some ridiculously funny explanation.
And that's Scouts Guide in a nutshell: wasted potential. It's a parody that fails at being a parody. There were countless opportunities for the film to really take apart the zombie genre, to embrace it and mock it simultaneously, but it never rises to the occasion.