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.
