Surprise! I officially ran out of holiday-based movie musicals on the Rotten Tomatoes list, but I couldn’t leave you guys hanging without a Christmas post! So here’s something guaranteed to ruin the holiday spirit – Anna and the Apocalypse!
I will admit, this is not my first watch of this movie. My friend Mark recommended this to me several years ago and after viewing I thought, “Hm, that made me sad,” and buried my feelings down deep. Viewing it back in 2019 fresh off heartbreak tainted my opinion of it, and I didn’t want to touch it with a socially distanced 6-foot pole in the subsequent pandemic years. Dusting it off now and reassessing with a fresh set of eyes, I will confess this is a genre-bending masterpiece and y’all have to see it. In fact, you can watch it for free on Hoopla if your library participates!
Anna and her friends are seniors in high school and are making decisions on what they should do after they graduate. Anna’s aggressively platonic best friend John plans to go to art school, but Anna wants to take a gap year and travel to Australia to the absolute horror of her father. Her dad tells Anna what a disappointment she would be to her dead mom, and then Anna gets to sit with that information all day at school – what a treat!
Steph, one of Anna and John’s friends, is similarly having a tough time because her parents decided to ship off to Mexico for the holidays, leaving her alone with her girlfriend who also doesn’t want to spend time with her on Christmas. Ouch. She decides to hyper-focus on the city’s homelessness problem to distract herself, and the future headmaster Arthur is like, “Why you gotta be a debbie downer all the time?” and steals Steph’s car keys in retaliation for suggesting they publish something in the school newspaper about it.
Teenage angst is running high in Little Haven, and the only way our protagonists can process their feelings of stagnation is through song!
Lisa, on the other hand, is over-the-moon excited for the Christmas concert as she has a special number planned for her boyfriend Chris. Anna does not have the same luck when it comes to relationships and instead gets propositioned in the hallway by her gorgeous but absolutely daft ex-boyfriend Nick, further cementing her decision to go over 9000 miles away to a completely different continent to get away from him.
“Wait… no.”
John is secretly heartbroken by Anna’s choice to flee as he silently has a big ‘ol crush on her, which makes lunch awkward when Chris and Lisa furiously make out in front of him and Anna at every opportunity. Chris comes up for air long enough for Steph to ask for his help on her homelessness story – if the future headmaster forbids her from posting it on the school blog, she’d make a movie about it instead to circumvent his authority. This logically makes no sense but don’t worry about it, it won’t matter at all in about 10 minutes. Chris agrees since his film teacher has already chided him for producing horror shlock that has no substance.
Teenage angst is running high in Little Haven, and the only way our protagonists can process their feelings about their doomed romantic entanglements is through song!
You ever hear a song and know the reprise is going to destroy you later?
After a hard tonal pivot, we’re treated with this absolute fucking banger, seriously, oh my god, please watch this, it’s one of the most glorious things I’ve ever seen in my whole life.
This is immediately followed by a fairly hilarious “Santa Baby” homage where a bunch of shirtless men dance with candy canes on stage while Lisa asks Santa to come on over and unload his sack.
Chris, Steph and Anna don’t get to witness these truly epic performances because they’re all busy working. John continually wins me over by being the most stylish one of the bunch to talk about how Olive the other reindeer was a total dick.
God, I love this kid.
This film does a great job at balancing the serious and the hilarious without giving you too much emotional whiplash. Nothing shows this balance better than “Turning My Life Around”, which features some truly epic dancing and zombie deaths.
The culmination of this joyous declaration of independence is, of course, the realization we have no control over our lives and everything and everyone is totally fucked. That’s right, zombies have come to town.
There were plenty of clues up until this point hinting at the eventual zombie takeover with car radio news stories about the pandemic, kids coming down with the flu, the insistence everyone use hand sanitizer… basically a bunch of stuff we are all acutely familiar with. The characters in the movie handled it the same way all of us did, by ignoring it until it became a problem that shuffled up to our literal doorstep.
Anna and John take refuge in the bowling alley and run into Steph and Chris, who have been camping out there since the night before. While the cell towers are out they still have internet access, and Steph floats the conspiracy theory that their current situation is the result of big pharma. If you’re immediately triggered by this sentiment, don’t worry, nothing will tin hat after this as it never comes up again. They spend the rest of the day waiting for the army to save them and theorizing which celebrities have already turned zombie. This seemingly low-key outing is interrupted when Steph has to kill the zombie cleaning lady with a toilet lid because she is an absolute savage.
There’s actually a good number of disgusting and amusing decapitations that had me cringing and laughing at the same time. The best of which are featured in a clear Shaun of the Dead homage cued to music and everything.
The next morning, after realizing the entirety of army has been turned, the foursome decide to head to the closest designated evacuation zone, their high school. Anna’s dad, Lisa and Chris’ grandmother Dot have been patiently waiting for help there. Dot has a bad heart, and when Lisa asks Arthur, the headmaster-in-charge, for medication, he basically says that it’s OK to sacrifice grandma in the name of capitalism.
God, I hate how accurate this movie ended up being.
While tiptoeing from the safe bowling alley through the unsafe streets, they run into everyone’s favorite piece of garbage, Nick, who has formed a gang of other assholes to loot stores and knock off zombies blocks. After criticizing John for being too beta, Nick asserts his alpha status in a song that definitely doesn’t resemble “Eye of the Tiger”.
Nick surfing on the cart filled with toilet paper is, again, too real.
Also, I giggled at this much longer than I should have.
Now escorted by their own personal security team, the kids continue their quest to reach the school. Anna is still convinced she will head to Australia after things are sorted, while John suggests that potentially, maybe, she stick around during the end of the world. Anna picks up that John is pining for her and assertively friendzones this poor kid during the apocalypse. John cannot catch a break, even with being the best dressed of the squad.
As the sun starts to set, the gang stumbles across a shortcut through a Christmas tree farm. Although it seems dangerous because of the lack of visibility, they decide to press on because they’re extremely stupid.
When I was a kid, my friend owned Titanic on VHS, and every once in a while she’d convince me to watch it with her. Because it was so fucking long it was split between two tapes, the first one mainly focusing on the love story between Jack and Rose and the second starting directly after the ship hits the iceberg. Most of the time we’d just watch the first tape and forgo the second one entirely so we could invent an ending where Jack and Rose made it to New York and lived the rest of their lives together.
I mention this because the rest of this movie is a bummer. If you’d like to imagine a world where Anna and everyone she cares about escape the city and live happily ever after, stop reading now! Merry Christmas! I’ll see you again in 2023!
For the rest of you masochists, I regret to inform you that in the skirmish, John and a bunch of Nick’s friends get bit by zombies and die. Also, the penguins are eating people. From here on out I pretty much sob and wonder why I torture myself by letting this movie trample all over the little bit of Christmas spirit I can force myself to muster. Conversely, Anna gets super strength from her grief and takes out a bunch of zombies on the way to the school.
Once the remaining kids reach the building, they are confronted by a very calm Arthur eating his Christmas dinner. He ushers them into the cafeteria and the gang is surprised to discover everyone sheltered there has succumb to the virus. Arthur apparently lost his fucking mind when the remaining survivors decided they should try to move on from the school since nobody was coming to their rescue, so now he’s hellbent on killing everyone else for some unknown reason. Thankfully Anna’s dad, Lisa and Dot are suspiciously absent from the horde, and after the gang narrowly escapes Arthur’s trap, they roam the school trying to find their loved ones and grab Steph’s car keys so they can hightail it out of there.
Steph and Chris discover Lisa and Dot hiding in a storeroom, but unfortunately Dot has fallen victim to her heart condition. After saying goodbye to grandma, the 3 of them navigate to Arthur’s office to grab Steph’s keys, but discover the way is blocked by their shuffling former classmates. Lisa and Chris provide a distraction with Chris’ latest creation of a more personal nature – a clip show of the friend’s exploits the last few days. Meanwhile Steph reenacts every stealth video game I’ve ever played by rolling her way under tables to reach the office door. When the batteries die in Chris’ phone and the movie stops, the zombies descend on Chris and Lisa. Steph can only look on in despair as she has to leave her friends behind. They may be doomed to die, but I take the tiniest bit of comfort in the fact they are together.
I hate everything.
Anna and Nick wander off to find her dad and Nick confesses his own father was bitten and forced his son to kill him, which I think is an attempt to humanize Nick or something? He’s not a dick because he took Anna’s virginity and dumped her afterward and bullies everyone in the entire school, he’s just been living under his army dad’s high expectations! When zombies attack the pair, Nick sacrifices himself to protect Anna so she can escape. She discovers her dad’s being held hostage by psycho-Arthur, and a musical battle ensues.
I honestly don’t understand why Arthur hates Anna’s dad so much. This is literally never explained.
While Anna is kicking some ass, dad overtakes Arthur and gets bit in the process. Dad wishes Anna a Merry Christmas before sending her away, and Anna heads outside with Nick (yes, he survives, bleh) with the small hope that Steph and the others will return with a way out of Little Haven.
Thankfully this movie didn’t kill its gays, and Steph pulls up in her sedan like a knight in shining armor. The remaining 3 contemplate where they should go, but with no clear path forward, they drive into the unknown.
There’s no such thing as a Hollywood ending.
Y’know, the holidays are always such a weirdly emotional time for everyone. I spend 25 days losing my mind trying to prepare for Christmas, the week after attempting to catch up with friends I haven’t seen all year, and the few days after New Years watching Fleabag in my basement while crying my eyes out. I honestly hate winter, it sucks all the hope out of you.
I understand the sentiment that the holiday season is an good reminder to appreciate and spend time with your family, because they’re supposed to be more important than the capitalist juggernaut Christmas has become. But, like, sometimes your family sucks. The more everyone reiterates the reason for the season, the harder it gets not to retreat inside your self-defeating inner monologue if you don’t have that happy bouncy support system. As the days go on, it can feel increasingly isolating as the others around you turn into a horde of winter-based cheer.
The metaphor of wanting more and not being able to self-actualize without physically leaving everyone else behind (whether by choice or because they’ve succumbed to the zombie virus) can be incredibly cathartic to watch this time of year. After the magic of Christmas has worn off, you realize Adulthood has no roadmap. All you can do is learn how to cope with the never-ending stream of crises and disasters until you die, and until that point, it’s up to you to create the moments that make staying alive worth it. Hooray!
Where was I going with this?
Oh, right. The holidays are primed to be a disaster, and I just wanted to acknowledge that I appreciate those of you who read my silly write-ups. Your support makes things a little less hard. I took on this project back in March 2020 out of spite, and to allow myself to focus on anything else other than the world falling apart around me. I continue it also out of spite. While these reviews are exhausting, I’m learning from them by exercising a muscle that has mostly laid dormant since college. I assuredly will not be crossing the finish line next year, but my progress bar is at 63%, which is encouraging!
So, watch this space in 2023 for more ridiculous commentary on some song and dance numbers.