By Dan Skip Allen

The zombie genre has been one that has been a bit overdone in Hollywood. Similar to the vampire genre, there isn’t much more you can do with this tired genre. “This Is Not A Test” based on the YA novel of the same name by Courtney Summers is the latest zombie film that has come out in theaters. It’s written/directed by Adam MacDonald, who is an actor turned director. It stars Olivia Holt in the lead role but has a young adult bent to it. That should attract a lot of teenagers who may have read the book. In a genre that has been a bit overdone lately, this movie isn’t tired or uninteresting. It has some good elements. 

Sloane Price (Olivia Holt) is a teenager who lives with her abusive father. Her sister Lily left her alone with him because she couldn’t take the abuse anymore. One morning, when she’s getting ready for school, they notice some screaming outside their window and the sound of cars crashing. When they open the door to look, they see people running around fast with crazed looks on their faces. They end up in a zombie apocalypse, and they don’t know what to do. When her dad is killed and turns, she has to kill him and then try to survive herself. She ends up falling in with a few high schoolers she knows. Together, they try to survive the zombie apocalypse and each other.

The aforementioned zombie genre has been one that filmgoers have seen a lot of in recent years. There have been slow zombies, Night of the Living Dead, and fast zombies or infected, World War Z, the 28 Weeks/Years Franchise. This is one of those kinds of zombie movies. The zombies move quickly and swarm fast. They break through windows and find entrances to buildings and boarded up rooms. They are pretty tricky to deal with. I would rather have these kinds of zombies rather than slow ones because they pose more of a threat to the people who are trying to run/survive them. This film seemed like it had a small budget, but the blood and gore effects were pretty good.

Olivia Holt has been in a few television shows and a handful of movies like Heart Eyes and Totally Killer among them. She knows her way around the horror genre pretty well by now. This is another horror movie that fits with what she’s been doing lately in her young career. She has a pretty good story in this film. The drama she’s dealing with regarding her father was a terrific plot device in the movie. Having dealt with an abusive parent in my life, I understand what she was probably going through. Her trust issues as a whole throughout the film are part of why she has so much trauma. She did give a good performance, as opposed to some of her co-stars in the movie.

The supporting cast was fine, not great, but not bad either. Froy Gutierrez, Chloe Avakian,Carson McCormac,  and Carteon Moore play the main character group that she’s with. They are all high-school kids like her, but each has their own motivation for trying to stay alive, but things get in their way. A teacher character and the main character’s sister are also depicted in the story and have key moments. For a group of actors I wasn’t that familiar with, they did a relatively good job of keeping interested in what was going on throughout the film. It was a decent cast. That’s all you can ask for in a movie these days.

“This Is Not A Test” is another zombie apocalypse film, but it does do something different than others have done in the past. Using the YA angle based on the Summers novel gave it something to go off of. MacDonald kept it simple, but the zombies were better than other movies I’ve seen from this genre. The blood and guts were done fine, and that added a dramatic element to the story. The main aspect, as always, in these types of stories is the human interactions and how these characters deal with each other. Their differences come into focus as the story unfolds. The cast was fine, but Holt was the standout for me. As a whole, this is a fine zombie film. I wouldn’t discourage people from seeing it at all. Younger people may be interested in watching it more than adults, though.

3 stars