This is Not a Test
Sloane Price has decided to leave the world, but the world decided to end anyway, sat in the bath tub with her suicide note and a Stanley knife, gathering her courage when the zombie apocalypse unfolds at her front door, her abusive alcoholic father dying as he saves her, a final act which doesn’t redeem all he has done to her or her sister Lily since their mother abandoned them all.
Sloane running in panic through the streets one step ahead of the hordes, she encounters other survivors she knows, students at Cortege High School, first taking shelter in a house then relocating to the high school, water and power still on and food in the cafeteria, though for how long they do not know, barricading themselves in to wait.
Based on the 2012 young adult novel of the same by Courtney Summers, This is Not a Test is a Canadian horror directed by Pyewacket and Out Come the Wolves’ Adam MacDonald, taking place in December 1998 and with Olivia Holt, Froy Gutierrez, Carson MacCormac, Corteon Moore and Chloe Avakian as survivors Sloane, Rhys, Trace, Cary and Grace, later finding creepy English teacher Mister Baxter (Killjoys’ Luke Macfarlane) in the closet.
Canada having produced inventive and intelligent horror classics both beyond and within the zombie genre, among them The Changeling and Pontypool, This is Not a Test has studied the greats but has not learned their lessons, feeling like a straight-to-SyFy television movie without a single original idea to its name, end-to-end dreary and peppered with bland flashbacks to the differently flavoured but equally miserable time before Z-day.
Lily (Joelle Farrow) braiding Sloane’s hair before storming out of their lives forever, in the present the mid-twenties teenagers bicker and drink their dead teacher’s hidden bottles of spirits and play dares, and while the world may be ending Sloane’s makeup is perfect, her sister’s advice to take one day at a time taken literally to do nothing but sit and wait for rescue with no plans and only Cary habitually carrying a weapon.
Land of the Dead (American financed but shot in Canada) and even Brain Freeze having done this same story better, with sad music to remind the viewer they’re not supposed to be cheering when someone dies through selfishness or stupidity and the poikilothermic nature of the infected meaning they would freeze in sub-zero temperatures yet still they run in the snow, that This is Not a Test is perhaps just as well as it would receive a failing grade.
This is Not a Test will be streaming on Shudder from Friday 22nd May
