by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” Zombie at 17, perhaps the most risible title anyone at Lifetime
has ever come up with (even sillier than Tiny House of Terror), produced by Pierre David and Tom Berry, directed
by someone named Alexandre Carrière and written — oh, the shame! — by Christine Conradt. Partially narrated in
voice-over by the titular heroine, Tia Scott (Celeste Desjardins), ostensibly
from her journals of her experiences during the senior year of high school, the
film begins with Tia telling us that at age 10 she witnessed the death of her
sister (we’re never told the sister’s name and it’s not clear whether she was
younger or older than Tia) when she was run over by a car. Tia’s dad left her
mom Kate (Laurie Fortier, top-billed) around the same time — though Conradt
doesn’t specify whether he left before or after the death of Tia’s sister — and
Kate has raised Tia and her younger brother Emory (Jack Britton) as a single
parent ever since. The main intrigue is that Tia is going through an odd
physical transformation — her eyes are ringed with red, they’re surrounded by
so much eye shadow she looks either like someone has regularly been punching
her out or she thought Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ look was really cool and decided
to emulate it, she’s becoming acutely sensitive to sound (at one point she goes
into her brother’s room and pulls the headphone cord out of his iPod because
she can hear the music even though it’s supposed to be inaudible without the
headphones, and it’s distracting her in her attempt to study) and she’s losing
bits and pieces of her memory, though she’s also becoming super-strong. In one
scene, Emory is nearly crushed by a bookcase when, in an attempt to retrieve
his game console on top of it, he knocks it over; mom can’t budge it but Tia
lifts it easily, though being a Lifetime mom Kate isn’t proud of her daughter
for saving her son’s life, but pissed at her for not telling her that she’s
developed a super-power.
There’s a subplot involving Tia’s boyfriend Conner
Foster (Carson MacCormac) — the film’s imdb.com page gives the spelling of his
first name as the more common “Connor” but “Conner” is the name we see on the
screen of Tia’s phone when Conner texts her — and an older couple he’s friends
with, Jason Ellzey (Connor McMahon, easily the hottest guy in the film — and,
of course, its principal villain!) and Jason’s partner Samantha “Sammy” Feldon
(Alanna Bale). Jason and Samantha arrange for Conner and Tia to get into a hot
dance club even though they’re underage, but while there Jason runs into a
young man of indeterminate race, Riley Denton (Gabriel Darku). Jason insists
that Riley owes him $3,000 — it’s not clear why but we get the impression Jason
is a drug dealer — and he’ll take Riley’s blue Mustang (which we never see — I
guess the production company’s budget didn’t extend to the rental of such a
cool car) in payment even though it’s worth $8,000 — and when Jason confronts
Riley outside the bar and Riley refuses, Jason literally beats him to death.
Then he tries to weasel his way out of it by claiming a fictitious assailant
confronted Riley in the bar, took him outside and beat him to death, and he
wants Conner and Tia to go along with his story. Conner does but Tia doesn’t —
she tells the police that while she didn’t see what happened, she did overhear Jason threaten Riley over a debt before the
two left — and this leads to an estrangement between them.
It also doesn’t help
that Tia is also seeing a young man named Flynn Murson (Seamus Patterson) and
tapping into his fount of zombie lore, which he’s accumulated in hopes of
helping his friend Steven Baker (Stephane Garneau), who’s suffering the same
“zombification” symptoms as Tia, only worse — so much worse that he literally chains himself to his own wall in order to keep from
escaping and killing humans to eat their brains. It helps that Flynn’s father,
Dr. Will Murson (Michael Gordon Shore), is a medical researcher who used to
work at a private lab in Philadelphia (where the film takes place) that was
looking for an improved anesthetic — only the lab was raided by a PETA-style
animal rights group which set all the animals free, destroyed years of research
work and drove the lab out of business: it was purchased by a local university
who swore to God and every other authority they could think of that they were not doing any experiments involving animals. Dr. Murson
recalls that the lab was run by Dr. Davrow (Floyd Moore), who in addition to
the official experiments was doing one on his own attempting to isolate a virus
that causes humans to turn zombie, and to find a cure for it. He brought back a
rat from Haiti that contained the zombie virus — one thing Conradt did right in her script was creatively mash up the traditional
Haitian zombie superstition with the modern one created by writer-director
George Romero in the film Night of the Living Dead (1968), in which zombies were mindless creatures
created by nuclear radiation, otherwise dead people who ambled around and
attacked humans to eat their brains.
Alas, Conradt couldn’t resist an
incredibly gross scene early in the film in which she opens a jar of frogs’
brains in the Riverton High School biology lab and snacks on them — when I
realized what was happening I yelled at the TV, “Christine! Don’t do
that to us!” — and the ending is really preposterous: Tea and her mom Kate trace Dr. Davrow and learn that he
developed an antidote to zombiedom but then got Alzheimer’s and forgot it. But
if Tia eats his brain, she’ll briefly absorb his memory and will be able to
dictate the formula for the antidote so Dr. Murson can prepare it and interrupt
the progress of her disease. Tia is too moral to shoot a human to eat his
brain, even though Davrow says he not only has Alzheimer’s but stage four
cancer and he’s not going to live much longer anyway, but in true Christine
Conradt fashion her dilemma is solved when in come Jason and Samantha (ya
remember Jason and Samantha?) to
eliminate Tia and Kate because they could be witnesses against them in the case
of Riley’s murder. Jason tries to shoot Tia, Davrow comes between them and
takes the bullet instead, and there’s a truly gross finale in which Tia eats
Davrow’s brain, recalls the formula and dictates it to Dr. Murson so she can be
treated and her zombieism successfully interrupted. I was hoping Zombie
at 17 would be a more subtle work and its
theme would be someone who fell prey to the delusion that she was a zombie out of a morbid obsession with
the death of her sister, but no such luck; this time around Christine Conradt
indulged her greatest weakness as a writer — ramping up the melodrama to the
point where it just becomes silly — and ignored her greatest strength, a
penchant for moral complexity and dramatic ambiguity far beyond that of most
Lifetime writers. I’ll still look forward to future Conradt credits, but this
time around she really
disappointed me!
