Based on a book by Courtney Summers, IFC has released upon the world a YA zombie apocalypse film that is sure to… evoke very little from you. The concept seems promising, in this Breakfast Club meets Dawn Of The Dead format, but the film just doesn’t do anything with it. We do get to see that there is a zombie horde, and the zombies do viciously get to attack from time to time, creating gory moments, but most of this film is five teens locked in their school, as the lone survivors of their community. To be fair, we just saw a version of this, and it is way better. If the idea of High school and Zombies sounds fun, Netflix finally put audio description on All Of Us Are dead, an international import that caught enough attention to finally get some basic text-to-speech.

This Is Not A Test finds five kids, supposedly very different, but not really filling archetypes the way the ensemble of the John Hughes classic did. Was it so hard to find a nerd? These five may not be besties, but they certainly aren’t on five different ends of the social spectrum.

They should find themselves in interesting predicaments, but really they spend the first half of the film waiting for their catalyst to show up. Then, we get Mr. Baxter (Luke McFarlane) who has found his way to the school to hide out, but the kids feel like they can’t trust their old teacher. It doesn’t help that he’s being a little too gross in his exchanges with the girls. But, his little section of the film had promise, he actually shook things up, pushed the plot forward, but sadly was mishandled, and not used to greater effect.

I love the zombie genre. The Walking Dead is my favorite TV show, and I still say Dawn Of The dead is Zach Snyder’s best work. This film, which I understand uses a lot of shaky cam, makes a lot of promises and fills none of them. For example, why is the movie in 1998? When The Plague did it, it was to return to traditional bullying, removing cyber bullying from the equation. Here, anything that might have gotten support from a later year could have been easily answered by knocking out the grid. No WiFi? o power. No bars? no cell tower. Basically, their phones become a camera whose battery is dying, and won’t be able to be recharged.

The Walking Dead never worried about cell phones disrupting the flow of the show, because it was understood that the collapse of society means we lose some creature comforts. They make no compelling reason for the year they are in.

The young talent here, led by Olivia Holt, do as much as they can with bland characters, but Luke McFarlane is the standout, and he’s not in that much of the film. Not one of my favorite films of the year, nor will I remember this for very long. The audio description is fine, and I wish I could have more concise details, but my Apple app was acting up, and I was having to do a lot to keep the AD going, as it kept trying to kick me out of it.

If this were a test, it would have failed.

Rotten: 4.8/10

Spoilers: What would I have done differently? I would have kept mr Baxter, especially once his bite is revealed. The kids already had the gun, and they should have locked him up. Having him there, allowing a rotation with the kids to watch him, would have let them see how long it takes to turn someone, if ever. You could have even kept his biting of someone else, and used that as part of the experiment.