Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #239: Zombie High (1987)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen. 

A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m deep into a look at the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well. 

Welcome to the third entry in Mad October, a special Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 side-quest where I write up the spookier side of Virginia Madsen’s filmography for one very kind, very appreciated patron. 

So far Mad October has been all about giddy excitement followed shortly by crushing disappointment. True, The Prophecy, the first Madsen terror tale I wrote up for this column, more or less lived up to its potential for camp/cult craziness, thanks largely to an amazing cast and a wonderful performance by Christopher Walken. 

But 1999’s The Haunting cruelly got my hopes up with a cast that includes Owen Wilson, Catherine-Zeta Jones, Liam Neeson,  Lili Taylor, Bruce Dern and of course Madsen before cruelly dashing them with limp, lumbering, CGI-choked execution that renders it the only version of Shirley Jackson’s classic fright fable with absolutely nothing going for it beyond the minor pleasure of Owen Wilson wowing his way through a goofy comic performance that quickly devolves into a lot of frantic yelling and running away from ghosts. 

Zombie High is just as disappointing but in a decidedly different way. On paper the movie radiates promise. It’s a horror comedy starring Virginia Madsen and Sherilyn Fenn as boy-crazy new students and future Bridesmaids and Ghostbusters (that would be the 2016 reboot, the real, definitive version) director Paul Feig as an exuberant geek with the gift of gab and a thing for the lovely ladies at an exclusive prep school with a sinister secret.  The teachers live forever through a serum derived partially from the brains of students. 

After having their sweet, sweet brain juice drained by educators who, honestly, do NOT seem to have their best interests in mind, the students become docile slaves to conformity, zombies, sort of, content to shuffle mindlessly through life. 

Zombie movies often contain an unmistakable element of social commentary and satire. That is particularly true now that a disconcertingly large percentage of the populace have willingly chosen to forego free will and the dictates of their own conscience and let Dr. Fraudski inject the Mark of the Beast inside them just so they don’t end up in one of Bill Gates’ Concentration Camps for the non-vaccinated. 

You’re all sheep, man! The people have turned into the sheeple! You’re all slaves to to the system and your god Joe Biden! 

Sorry. I  vowed never to let my far-right-wing political beliefs and anti-vaccine, anti-mask convictions bleed into my pop culture writing and I have let myself and you down on that note for the first, last and only time. 

All I’ll say is that “Doctor” Fauci is LITERALLY Hitler and getting vaccinated will LITERALLY kill you and turn you into a zombie! 

Before it devolves into a crushing bore Zombie High gets off to a start that cruelly tricked me into thinking I might be watching a bona fide classic, a horror-comedy version of Rock and Roll High School. 

Oh, cruel hope! Damn you, devilish delusion! Zombie High begins with a surplus of rock-fueled energy and impish humor as it follows heroine Andrea (Madsen) as she attempts to fit in at Ettinger, an elite, previously all-male boarding school. 

Feig makes an indelible impression as Emerson, the school’s resident non-conformist. He’s Some Kind of Wonderful’s Duckie on steroids, a cross between Woody Allen and Rick Moranis who brings a geeky comic energy the film otherwise sorely lacks. 

Zombie High stops even trying to funny about twenty minutes in. Its willingness to sacrifice comedy, satire and social commentary for the sake of chasing scares is even more unfortunate considering that Zombie High is never remotely scary. 

Andrea’s jock boyfriend from her old school and old life is understandably worried that his gorgeous girlfriend will leave him behind, particularly once the men and boys of Ettinger start throwing themselves at her, most notably a teacher with bedroom eyes and any number of dark secrets.

The most notable of Andrea’s many suitors is a hunky teacher with bedroom eyes and an air of enigmatic intensity who freaks her out by shamelessly trying to seduce before letting her in on Ettinger’s secret world of brain-hungry teachers and mind-controlled students. 

Our heroine eventually discovers the reason why rebellious classmates are turning into meek sheep and the teachers never seem to age. 

Is Zombie High really even a zombie movie? Despite its title, Zombie High owes as much, if not more, to a subset of horror movies derived from Stepford Wives in which people previously blessed with free will and independence are transformed into mindless conformists through some manner of evil technology. 

Zombie High joylessly hits all the beats of zombie movies and Stepford Wives knock-offs as it lurches joylessly to a close. The movie seems to be going through the motions every bit as mechanically and soullessly as the cursed prep school kids at its core. 

Zombie High closes with our heroes defeating the evil faculty and liberating their fellow students from their zombie-like states through sound before turning into cartoons and driving into a moon with vampire fangs. 

It’s a loopy injection of weirdness and personality that’s too little, too late. Forget being a 1980s zombie version of Rock n’ Roll High School: Zombie High falls short of even the low, low standard set by Rock and Roll High School Forever.

Nearly two decades before Feig delivered what we can all agree is the definitive Ghostbusters he dabbled in horror-comedy fare in a would-be sleeper that, unlike the 2016 Ghostbusters, failed to make everyone in the world happy. 

Did Feig learn from his experiences with Zombie High? Obviously. He would go on to make his mark on film and pop culture as a filmmaker rather than a thespian, although if I might give him the very faintest of praise, he is undoubtedly the best part about Zombie High, a very bad movie starring people destined for bigger and better things. 

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