Anna and the Apocalypse

Anna and the Apocalypse

Comedy and horror are strange bedfellows. As an odd couple, they’ve birthed movies such as Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein,” Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” and Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” Few pictures in this subgenre of a subgenre apart from perhaps Burton’s adaptation of the Broadway show “Sweeny Todd” and Frank Oz’s “Little Shop of Horrors” have gone full-tilt boogie-woogie as boldly as John McPhail’s Christmas-themed zombie comedy, “Anna and the Apocalypse.”

The Anna (Ella Hunt) of the title is a high school senior excited to take a gap year before college to see the world beyond her Scotland home if her overprotective dad (Mark Benton) doesn’t thwart her plans. After school, she works at a bowling alley with her best friend John (Malcolm Cumming), who mostly keeps his romantic feelings toward her in check. The two pals around with lovebirds Chris (Christopher Leveaux) and Lisa (Marli Siu), and unknowingly share their schoolyard cynicism with campus activist Steph (Sarah Swire), an American student recently dumped by her girlfriend whose parents have left her alone for Christmas.

But by morning, their humdrum spirits will seem like much ado about nothing in post zombie apocalypse Scotland. On their way to school, Anna and John encounter their first monster and decide to hunker down back at their bowling alley, where they run into Chris and Steph. The audience members and performers in the school’s Christmas show including Anna’s dad and Lise lock themselves in the cafeteria at the command of uptight principal Savage (Paul Kaye). Now our group must make it back to each other at school before it’s too late.

“Anna,” obviously, shares quite a bit with Edgar Wright’s breakout zombie comedy, “Shaun of the Dead.” Each movie relishes the grotesque task of killing zombies, and so sets up comical opportunities for our heroes to fight back with vinyl records or pointy lawn ornaments. The scene where Anna puts in her headphones for an upbeat musical number as zombies tear through her neighborhood has to have been at least subconsciously influenced by the morning after scene when Shaun repeats his morning routine without noticing that zombies had consumed his next-door neighbors and likely the convenience store clerk; McPhail’s quick-cut montage of the group getting into a car and driving away is one of many stylistic nods to Wright’s frenetic cuts.

The many pop songs only further this energetic spirit. Like a scrappier, naughtier “High School Musical” which called for more impaling we’ll hear from these teens about not fitting in, about their affections not being requited. Sometimes the transitions into song are a bit bumpy, but some of them are so offbeat that they’re easy to laugh at. In one tune, Savage chides students for tweeting every empty thought they have; in another, a group of bullies sings a macho zombie killing ditty while their undead opponents provide backup moans.

For Lise’s Christmas show performance, she sings such a dirty song full of double entendres it would’ve made Ernst Lubitsch proud well, that’s not all: Midway through her song about giving Santa something he wants for Christmas (“It’s my virginity,” if you must know), six shirtless men in red shorts and suspenders flank her on stage to drive home the number’s sexual overtones.

The buoyant character of “Anna and the Apocalypse” can be seen in its cinematography which ranges widely from vibrant spaces like the Christmas show stage to the drabbest shade of dreary outside during the zombie invasion. These visual juxtapositions amplify what is already an odd mix of death, destruction, high kicks and high notes. In a more rational film, those two different color palettes might have seemed too jarring but it does work in this movie to show the chaos much of which happens off-screen or in fast doctored shots of the town. What it lacks in budget, it makes up for in spirit.

How many other Christmas-themed horror comedy musicals boast such hummable songs, witty jokes thrown into tense moments, and a cast committed to pulling it all off? “Anna and the Apocalypse” is a godsend for the midnight movie crowd that’s just as likely to burst into song as to cheer each major zombie kill. It’s one of those few horror films that leaves you with warm holiday feelings.

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