Movie Review: "Anna and the Apocalypse" Is That Xmas Zombie High School Musical You Ordered

I know what you’re thinking: "Not another Christmas-themed zombie high school musical?"

Anna and the Apocalypse is a film seemingly born from the creative process of randomly selecting suggestions out of a sock. For all we know, its makers might have been a few folded pieces of paper away from a black-and-white drama about werewolves celebrating Hanukkah instead.

But Xmas-zombie-high school musical it is. Sorry: Scottish Xmas-zombie-high school musical.

Yet, even despite its singular mishmash of IMDB keywords, director John McPhail’s Anna and the Apocalypse cribs heavily from Shaun of the Dead (which, if you count the "Don’t Stop Me Now" sequence, was kind of a musical too). There’s a scene in which Anna (Ella Hunt), our hero, cheerfully sings to herself on the way to school and fails to notice the zombie carnage unfolding around her. Same thing happened to Simon Pegg’s Shaun in 2004, though he wasn’t going to school and he wasn’t singing, so maybe Anna's in the clear as far as copyright law is concerned.

Set in the small Scottish town of Little Haven, Anna and the Apocalypse centers on a troupe of teenagers with your typical, everyday teenage woes: Anna’s pining for bad boy Nick (Ben Wiggins); her bestie John (Malcolm Cumming) pines for Anna; Steph (choreographer Sarah Swire) is an ostracised queer student; Chris (Christopher Leveaux) and Lisa (Marli Siu) gross everyone out with their PDAs. There’s a Christmas pageant coming up, presided over by ruthless Mr. Savage (Paul Kaye). Oh, and they live in Little Haven, which isn’t exactly a bustling metropolis of opportunity.

As if a lack of employer options wasn’t enough to give these teens the willies, there are zombies as well. One day, a horde of undead start noshing on the townsfolk, and the school-uniformed Anna and company have to fight their way through to reunite with their loved ones. They even occasionally break into song while breaking skulls, to original tunes by Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly. Side note: I would have also accepted the alternate film titles Singin’ in the Brainnnns or Dead Evan Hanson.

As a musical, Anna and the Apocalypse is eh, with the songs never quite graduating to the level of 'catchy'; certainly not as catchy as the flesh-eating virus apparently making its way across Little Haven and the world at large, claiming the noggin of, sob, Justin Bieber. As a high school movie, it’s a hell of a lot better, and the performances by Hunt and Siu in particular are deeply affecting. (The cast is uniformly committed to the singing and dancing too, which helps.)

Unexpectedly, it’s as a zombie flick that Anna and the Apocalypse really thrives. The early sequences and some of the flat comic beats seem to skew super young, but when the zombies emerge, only to be routinely dispatched in increasingly bloody ways, Anna comes alive. They get gored and decapitated and re-killed fairly uniquely (with a couple of bowling balls in one instance). Based on a 2010 short called Zombie Musical by Ryan McHenry (who is co-credited as a writer with Alan McDonald, and who sadly passed away in 2015), this feature-length adaptation is great at the 'Zombie', and only okay at the 'Musical'.

3/5

In Australian cinemas now. Rated MA15+ for strong comedic violence, blood and gore.

Header Image: Icon Films