NOW streaming on Shudder, This Is Not A Test might have started off with Day of the Dead notions, but finishes up being purely lifeless for a whole other set of frustrating reasons.
From the off, writer, director and producer, Adam MacDonald, clearly decided to ‘hold the zombies’ and instead focus on making the most banal apocalyptic bilge imaginable.
Here you have a bunch of red-blooded American teenagers whose idea of an end of the world blowout is to barricade themselves into their school gymnasium. That would be all well and good if this was the real world and their job wasn’t to entertain the George A Romero-obsessed legions.
No, we do not want them to survive. We want to see them run, hide, fertilise their pants, and fight for their lives as ravenous undead corpses hunt them down in packs and they are eliminated in order of their level of irritation to the coldhearted viewer.
If it’s bleak MacDonald was after, that would be one thing, but this is just banal. If he was aiming to remake The Breakfast Club with an Armageddon twist, I could forgive him his failings, but This Is Not A Test does not do what it says on the tin.
Testing from beginning to end, it lacks a pulse, a heart, and doesn’t seem to have much going on upstairs either. The characters are dull as dishwater, and the script is lifeless beyond hope.
I spent the whole film hoping someone would open the doors to this high school so the hordes of undead, that were allegedly waiting outside, could feed on these depressed teens’ not very appetising brains.
The lack of zombies in a zombie flick is bad enough, but MacDonald completely fails to bring his characters or his comatose excuse for a film to life.
(2/5)