Sometimes (OK, a lot of the time), I like to curl up on the sofa and watch something totally mindless in order to give the brain cells a good rest after a hard day's graft in front of a hot computer; B-movie creature feature Zombeavers is about as dumb as it gets—and I loved it! The film opens in unabashed stereotypical monster movie fashion with two moronic truck drivers transporting a load of bio-hazardous waste (Trioxin, perhaps?), only to lose one of the barrels when they hit a deer in the road. The barrel is thrown from the truck, rolls into a nearby river, travels over some rapids, and comes to rest next to a beaver dam, where it springs a leak.
We're then introduced to the film's eye-candy, hot sorority sisters Mary (Rachel Melvin), Zoe (Cortney Palm) and Jenn (Lexi Atkins), who intend to spend a few quiet days in the country having girly fun together, sauntering about in their incredibly short shorts and lounging around the nearby lake in their eensy-weensy bikinis. However, their weekend doesn't go quite according to plan: the girls' randy boyfriends, Sam (Hutch Dano), Tommy (Jake Weary) and Buck (Peter Gilroy), turn up uninvited (and who can blame them, with such sexy girlfriends?), Jenn narrowly escapes from a vicious beaver that gets into the kitchen, and, the next morning, the whole group is attacked by a colony of the ravenous aquatic rodents while they are swimming.
After making a dash for the safety of their cabin, the three terrified couples try to come up with a plan while fending off the toothy critters that, for some reason, don't seem to want to stay dead.
Please don't make the mistake of taking any of this seriously: Zombeavers is essentially a tongue-in-cheek paean to trashy 80s horror. Think along the lines of OTT comedy/horror Piranha 3D and its even more outrageous sequel 3DD, or the equally excessive Feast trilogy, and you'll have a good idea of what to expect from this gloriously daft and very gory piece of good-natured nonsense: a glut of genre clichés, predictably stupid characters, nonsensical plot developments, gratuitous nudity and sex, and cheap and cheerful (mostly) old-school special effects, including numerous shonky beaver puppets and some nifty splatter.
I had so much fun with this incredibly silly but amazingly entertaining flick that I'll happily rate it a whopping 8.5/10, rounded up to 9 for letting my favourite girl, Zoe, make it through to the very end.
Well, almost.