‘Anna and the Apocalypse’ Review: They Sing, Dance and Get Eaten

The Scottish novelty item “Anna and the Apocalypse” isn’t the first zombie movie musical and seems unlikely to be the last. A generally desperate subgenre that suggests the limits of camp, the zombie musical includes titles like the 1964 schlock-fest “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies” and the palpably weirder 2018 Disney Channel release, “Z-o-m-b-i-e-s.” This Disney video cheapie weds the durable high school-musical template with rapping, dancing and appetite-suppressed zombies who just want to fit in with the pastel people.

The comparatively straighter “Anna and the Apocalypse” also features the usual girl-and-boy blah-blah, which plays out against a wan zombie cataclysm. Set at Christmastime in a Scottish town so generic that it might as well be in a Disney studio, the movie tracks Anna (Ella Hunt), a high school student on the verge of graduating. She wants to travel rather than go right to college, which irritates her father (Mark Benton). She has two other guys in her life, John (Malcolm Cumming), a nice, boring boy; and Nick (Ben Wiggins), an alleged bad boy who proves equally bland.

A few supporting types populate Anna’s periphery; some get eaten, others do not. Most of the story’s mild friction is generated by its regularly timed deaths and by a hostile deputy headmaster, Mr. Savage (Paul Hyde), a malcontent in an ill-fitting suit who’s not nearly ferocious enough. That’s about it, with singing and dancing mixed in with the munching. The cleverest number involves Anna emerging from her home the day the apocalypse blows up. Wearing earbuds, she remains cheerfully oblivious to the surrounding chomp-chomp, which might have worked as a comment on the narcissism of youth but instead plays like a rip-off of “Shaun of the Dead,” a far superior zombie movie.

Like some features that originated as short movies, “Anna and the Apocalypse” never earns its longer running time. (This one’s short, “Zombie Musical,” was directed by Ryan McHenry, who died in 2015.) Zombies and teenagers may seem like a natural fit (certainly Disney banked on it), but “Anna and the Apocalypse” is more sketch than developed movie. Directed by John McPhail from a script by McHenry and Alan McDonald, the movie is thinly plotted, its pacing slack, its staging uninspired; Anna remains merely an idea for a plucky heroine, despite Hunt’s smile and sweat. As for the zombies, well, the living-dead makeup isn’t bad. But it’s a shame they don’t receive more screen time, or dance and sing while feasting on all the disposable bloody brains and guts.