Unhuman is, well, unwatchable
Saw and The Collector luminary Marcus Dunstan's zombie-horror-comedy mostly fails at all three
Film Reviews Unhuman
If you’re a fan of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, scribes of the later Saw sequels and the Feast trilogy, you know what to expect from them: gore, vomit, red filters, and maybe a half-clever plot twist. If you’re not a fan, it’s best to stay as far away as possible from Unhuman, a cheap-looking, awkwardly calibrated horror-comedy which only the team’s truest devotees could love.
Directed by Dunstan, whose The Collector was superior on every level, the movie begins with a title proclaiming it “A Blumhouse After School Special,” followed by a card “revealing” it’s “presented by the student-teacher division—STD.” This is as clever as the humor gets. The story proceeds to introduce us to the usual teen movie archetypes—jerky jocks, sensitive comic-book and D&D dorks, goth princesses, prom queens, introverts—before loading them onto a school bus for a field trip. Conveniently, they’re required to surrender their cell phones to the extremely hammy supervising teacher (Peter Giles), getting that essential modern horror shortcut out of the way.
It isn’t long before a big explosion of blood hits the bus’ windshield out of nowhere, sending it crashing and busting the cheerleader’s nose. But that’s the least of their worries; the radio, on an emergency broadcast frequency, warns of a chemical weapons attack. Next, a scary-looking metalhead knocks on the bus’ front door. Zombies aren’t generally smart enough to knock, right? Wrong. Every movie makes its own rules, and before long the teacher’s face gets bitten off. The kids make a run for it out the back door, and make it to an abandoned building seemingly repurposed into a kind of funhouse for rave kids. But it soon becomes clear that they’re expected—someone or something planned for these specific kids to show up on this day.
Now, granted, zombies pose an immediate threat, especially since these seem like the running kind. But everyone seems remarkably unfazed by the whole “chemical weapons attack” part of the scenario. Sure, protect against the immediate threat, but also maybe cover your faces? Or at least, in these Covid times, make some joke about masking being tyranny to explain it away? Never mind. That would be funnier than anything else in the movie.
As Dunstan and Melton’s frequent collaborator John Gulager understood, audiences will forgive bad gore effects in a horror comedy provided the humor works. Troma’s entire existence is predicated on that principle, and Peter Jackson’s early career depended upon it. Judging by this and The Collector, Dunstan’s better at directing straight horror, as he has trouble settling on a tone here, or even consistent direction of the cast. Ali Gallo as Tamra, the goth queen, and Drew Scheid as Stephen, the self-proclaimed “Level 20 Wizard,” stand out as actors taking the situation seriously. Everyone else, though, plays it to 11 like they’re in a Saturday Night Live sketch. When the blood hits the bus, Giles’ over-the-top instructor simply remarks, “Let’s just hope he was a racist so we don’t have to feel bad.”
Visuals go equally all over the place—Dunstan still loves his red filters and smoke machines. There’s a blacklight sequence that gets creative, but when Saw-style horror movie lighting is finally attempted towards the end, it arrives too late to scare anyone.
The plot takes a turn about halfway through the film that suggests the script had more potential on the page, but at the very least it keeps Unhuman from being identical to every other low-budget zombie attack flick. There’s no need to spoil, but if you’ve already purchased the VOD and are tempted to turn it off prematurely, at least hang in there until the story starts developing flashbacks.
Nevertheless, the filmmakers felt the need to add voiceover at the end explaining the moral of their story. Generously assuming that Unhuman was meant to have a message at all, surely it ought to have come across without being explicitly verbalized. Then again, maybe it’s meant as South Park-style “I learned something today!” irony. And yet, even after a tone that’s so uneven it requires this coda to communicate their intent, there’s also a mid-credits tease for a sequel. Unhuman 2? Based on this, it seems unlikely.
26 Comments
Which is worse, Unhuman or the Inhumans tv series?
Can I choose suicide?
Humanity, sadly…
Check out One Cut of the Dead. Sounds like they did the remote building thing much better for starters.
The japanese routinely make better horror movies.
Please stop trying to bring back the “[something] is, well,…” crutch. It doesn’t make anyone sound thoughtful, it’s not natural sounding, and it is just as annoying now as it was, well, thirty years ago.
Please stop trying to bring back the “stop trying to bring back the” crutch.
That’s so fetch.
Fetch, bitches.
We should really consider bringing back “phrasing” though…
The Collector is absurd if you think about for more than a split second. But on a basic level, it’s a close-quarters, gory horror movie with a surprising bit of heart. Which you might never guess based on the director/writer’s other works. Including The Collection, which was a movie.Which is to say—I wouldn’t have been surprised if this movie turned out to be pretty good, but I am just as not-surprised it’s probably terrible.
Are bits of heart really that surprising in a gory horror movie?/s
Star.
I actually liked the collection – it randomly came on after a movie I had fallen asleep to on… maybe the Shudder app? All I know is I woke up to a ton of people dancing in a club, and my first thought was “this is too many people for a horror movie”, and then the next scene was a spinning spike trap descending from the ceiling. Absurdity.
I found a poster for this movie online where the tagline for the movie was “The dead will have this club for breakfast” while the main character(?) is shown holding a baseball bat, so I guess that’s where we’re at in terms of writing.
Not sure where the baseball bat comes in, but that’s a Breakfast Club reference for the jock, prom queen, goth etc aspect of the movie, right?Seems right for low budget horror-comedy.
I think the joke was that bat=club. Which is … strained to say the least.
Doubtful. It’s a Breakfast Club reference, the bat isn’t part of the tagline — or that’s how it looks to me.edit: Looking it up, this tagline is actually a tweet with a video embedded, and you can see all the different high school stereotypes reflected in the video.When you Google it, it does come up next to the opening frame of the video clip: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9CThe+dead+will+have+this+club+for+breakfast%E2%80%9D&client=ms-android-google&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8And I can see how that looks like a baseball bat, but on quick inspection it’s a sword. In the full context of the video, it’s definitely a Breakfast Club reference, with no bats or other such clubs (but one sword) in evidence.
Even more baffling…
I went to club sandwich first. I am just hungry, though. Maybe it works on many levels?
Many levels….just like a club sandwich….makes u think
There’s only one blacklight action scene I care about.
So it’s ungood?
Double plus ungood.
I am super into this concept but man, sounds like they messed it up pretty bad. I absolutely loved Daybreak, and I was kind of hoping that it was a bit like that.
Everything after Saw 1 is junk. But the Collector/Collection was fully my jam, and so were all three Feast movies. Pity this one couldn’t have come in somewhere along those lines. Oh well on to the next one guys.