This Is Not a Test

Directed by Adam MacDonald, This Is Not a Test follows several teens, including Olivia Holt’s Sloane and Corteon Moore’s Cary, as they take shelter within a high school during a zombie apocalypse. It’s an appealing spin on very familiar territory that is, for the most part, employed to underwhelming (and, eventually, interminable) effect by MacDonald, as the filmmaker, armed with his own screenplay, delivers a low-rent, sluggishly-paced endeavor that boasts few wholeheartedly agreeable attributes – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by Holt’s woefully unconvincing performance and a uniformly lackluster assortment of one-dimensional protagonists. (Luke MacFarlane’s electrifying yet all-too-short-lived appearance as a teacher temporarily lifts the proceedings out of its stagnant, tedious atmosphere, at least.) There’s little doubt, as well, that MacDonald’s regrettable reliance on shaky camerawork during the picture’s zombie-attack sequences drains such moments of their energy and tension (and, worse still, renders them incoherent), while the movie’s padded-out (and rather endless) climactic stretch ensures that the whole thing peters out to a fairly palpable degree – which ultimately secures This Is Not a Test‘s place as a distressing misfire that aggressively squanders its promising setup.

1/2* out of ****