I love B monster movies. I have since I was a little kid. Watching marathons on television over summer break, old black and white classics like Them or The Birds and more modern (at the time) schlock fests like Night of the Lepus, I couldn’t get enough of them. Insane, unnatural animals terrorizing human beings, using some strange intellect and their own natural abilities to bring chaos to the screen just gave me a giddy thrill. From the moment I pressed play on Zombeavers I found myself enthralled in that same childish delight. I mean, the movie that starts out with two inept delivery guys hauling off some strange, radioactive waste while they’re talking about some of the more…unique aspects of their lives before crashing into and subsequently exploding a deer in the middle of the road. Let me repeat this for you just in case you were skimming this intro: EXPLODING DEER. It was very reminiscent to the opening of Cabin Fever 2 and twice as entertaining. A container of the toxic sludge flies off into the river and contaminates a beaver lodge, mutating them into undead, flesh-hungry rodents looking to feed on horny teens.

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And, it just so happens they’re in luck.

A girls’ weekend in a remote cabin becomes an all-out bash complete with topless swimming, the most intentionally hilarious sex scene in cinematic history, and an angsty subplot between two young lovers trying to reconcile. A late night attempt at showering introduces us and our campers to their first radioactive zombie beaver who is quickly beaten to death -or so they think- and tossed in a trash bag onto the front porch. The next morning, to clear their heads and get back on track with their summer fun, the majority of the crew goes swimming in the nearby lake only to be attacked by an entire family of zombeavers. A foot and a dog are both sacrificed for the escape and, once inside, the original beaver is back, a mess of exposed organs and tendons holding its upper and lower sections together like some macabre accordion smacking the ends together and apart as it attacks. After beating, kicking, stabbing and finally decapitating the ravenous rodent, they decide to chuck the head off the front porch as a “warning” to the other beavers surrounding them.

Okay, let’s just take a moment to think about this. You’ve lost a dog, a foot, and a few patches of skin to some buck-toothed lunatic animals but, yeah, hurling parts of one of their bodies to their buddies in some mafia style intimidation tactic is going to do something positive for you, right?

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Needless to say, things go from bad to worse as the beavers chew through phone lines, electric poles, and trees that fall across the lone road leading out of the scenic lakefront community. Splitting into groups, stumpy (our one legged comic relief) and his girlfriend plus a character whose only real purpose is to round out the numbers of our initial protagonists, all take off to look for help. Finding the trees down and the nearby neighbors murdered and mutated into zombie were-beavers, they attempt to make it back to the cabin. A local hunter/fur trapper joins their ranks but, in the end, there can be only one. Limping her way out of the zombie were-beaver killing fields, she limps along a lonesome, but familiar stretch of highway. Thinking salvation is in sight we end with our same two inept philosopher delivery guys repeating history. The screen goes blank and that’s when the magic truly starts.

A lot of us wait through the end credits of three hour long films now, bladders aching, 3D IMAX eye strain burning our retinas just for that extra nine seconds of footage. Instead, we get a gag reel complete with extended bits of comedic gold set to the lounge crooning of the theme as soon as the credits start to roll.

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Boys and girls, I’m going to be honest with you. There is nothing remotely frightening about this movie. The zombeavers are comically bad. I mean just some bargain basement animatronic puppets with jerking body motions and ridiculously immobile feet. They look like poor examples of taxidermy with glowing blue eyes and lacquered buck teeth. And that is what makes them so great. You know the minute you see them that they are not only fake but far from frightening. And it’s an intentional cheapness. The film itself is a beautiful satirical homage to the most overused and popular tropes in the horror genre and to all B monster movies that have come before it. There’s gore, girls, and god awful jokes that make this a fantastically fun movie to watch.

And now, I leave you with the highly underrated lounge hit of 2014, Zombeavers featuring Nick Amado:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tsm1IrJG1s]

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About The Author

monsterid

Dan Lee is a horror fiend and writer with a love for monster movies and demonic possession stories and lives in the strange hinterlands just outside of a major Southern metropolis. As a lover of books and movies, he spends much of his time secluded in well-lit rooms reading classic sci-fi and horror while a scary movie plays soothingly in the background. With stories appearing in Deadman’s Tome, Devolution Z, and on his own blog and multiple sites across the internet, he’s slowly but steadily spreading his brand of strange, macabre fiction like a zombie virus across the world. His novella A Thousand Little Deaths is available via Amazon.