Tag Archives: Adam MacDonald

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Teenage Wasteland

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This Is Not a Test

by Hope Madden

Take The Breakfast Club, eliminate the humor and add zombies and you’re headed in the direction of Adam MacDonald’s This Is Not a Test.

Olivia Holt is Sloane, an utterly miserable teenage girl. Her older sister took off, leaving her alone with her abusive dad. And if that’s not enough, the zombies are here. And not that slow, rambling kind. It’s the red-eyed, fast moving, pissed off kind.

MacDonald, working from a script he co-wrote with Courtney Summers, pays tribute to his Z-film inspirations the moment Sloane steps out onto her front porch to take in the suburban carnage.

So, yes, both Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake—among others—get a nod. Which makes you wonder, as you must wonder every time somebody makes another zombie movie, why do it? What new idea can you bring to the genre?

I suppose it’s the teen angst angle that John Hughes exploited for an entire career. And though there are cinematic pauses (human reactions lagging to frustrating slowness so the camera can witness the unfurling action), stupid choices (almost a necessity in most horror flicks), and a lot of shouty drama, somehow it feels likelier given that our protagonists are all high school seniors.

They can be dramatic with their friends, that’s all I’m saying.

Holt is solid and the young cast around her ably handles the melodrama and action. Corteon Moore is particularly impressive in the kind of Alpha male jock character rarely allowed nuance.

Likewise, Luke Macfarlane pops in mid film to be unseemly, desperate and creepy in equal measure.

Sloane’s arc is not with her classmates, though, but with her sister. There’s a simplicity to the arc that allows the carnage to get showy without overpowering it. But that simplicity adds to the film’s relative ordinariness.

There’s nothing bad about This Is Not a Test. Yes, character behavior is often frustrating, but not in a way that makes caricatures out of characters. The problem is that there’s nothing exceptional about the film, either.

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Feeding Frenzy

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Out Come the Wolves

by Hope Madden

Predator and prey. Alpha and beta. Necessary and expendable. Writer/director Adam MacDonald puts these ideas into perspective with his latest thriller, Out Come the Wolves.

MacDonald returns to the woods, where he’s long wrought havoc (Pyewacket, Backcountry). In this forest, Sophie (MacDonald’s regular collaborator Missy Peregrym) is hoping her childhood best friend Kyle (Joris Jarsky) can teach her big city boyfriend Nolan (Damon Runyan) how to hunt.

Nolan’s a writer planning an article on the experience, but he’s also eager to meet Sophie’s dear friend to get acquainted and maybe gauge the competition.

MacDonald’s cinematic bread and butter has been the small cast, big woods, test of the survival instinct. In Backcountry it was a bear; in Pyewacket, a demon. The title here probably gives away the antagonist this go-round, but MacDonald has more in store for us than just a couple of hungry wolves.

Though small cast plus limited location generally equals low budget, Out Come the Wolves boasts impressive production values. Interiors, though slightly hokey and sometimes obvious, develop tension with claustrophobic close ups. MacDonald also takes this first (mainly interior) act to set up the gender politics at work, something he plays off of well in the coming outdoor adventure.

Jarsky delivers the most believable performance, one fraught with roiling emotions and conflicting goals. Runyan is slightly hamstrung by the underwritten “big city guy” role, but he finds a nice balance between smug and vulnerable, insecure and earnest.

Peregrym’s third act makes her first act easier to stomach. She’s saddled early on with a bad dance scene and unrealistic levels of emotional ignorance. It’s not Peregrym’s fault—the writing team (MacDonal and Jarsky along with Enuka Okuma) unable to craft a realistic character is to blame. And Peregrym does what she can, but it’s not until the final third of the film that she gets any opportunity to shine.

It’s still not a very convincing character, but the performance elevates the script.

Out Come the Wolves has some obvious ideas on its mind. It takes those ideas in tense, often interesting directions buoyed by Jarsky’s performance, in particular.