Adapted from a YA novel by Courtney Summers, This Is Not A Test comes to the screen via writer-director Adam MacDonald. He's done quite a bit of horror before this, and can be very good in the genre, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from this.
It's zombie outbreak time yet again, and a group of teens end up hiding out in a school building. One of them (Sloane, played by Olivia Holt) seems to spend most of her time thinking about her past life, one in which she had to put up with an abusive father (Jeff Roop), but also spent a fair bit of time with a loving older sister, Lily (Joelle Farrow). That's really all you need to know.
Although I'm unfamiliar with the source text, I'm tempted to assume that MacDonald didn't have the greatest material to work with. There's no other reason for this being as bad as it is, unless you were trying to stay true to something that just wasn't very good. The school setting has excellent potential, considering the dividing line between adults and children in that environment, as well as the various divisions between the children themselves, but nothing is used effectively here.
Viewers are instead stuck alongside a group of characters who are, at best, painfully uninteresting. At worst, they're annoying enough to make you want to root for some of the zombies. I struggled to care about a single person onscreen, aside from Holt's character, and that's at least partly to do with how little they're given to actually do, aside from bicker and fight amongst themselves for what seems like most of the runtime.
Holt at least feels worthy of the lead role, and she's already been involved in some other projects that will help this to vanish from memory soon enough. Others around her are played by Froy Gutierrez, Carson MacCormac, Chloe Avakian, and Corteon Moore, and I wouldn't be able to tell you what they managed to bring to their roles. In fact, I doubt I would recognise them right now. This is the kind of film that turns the end credits into the equivalent of the memory-erasing flashy thing used by the Men In Black. Roop and Farrow both fare a bit better, and Luke Macfarlane livens things up a bit for his few scenes at about the halfway point.
This should have either been more fun, maybe a bit livelier (no pun intended), or a bit darker. YA fans can handle dark content. I've seen most of the movies aimed at that demographic (hey, I'm often happy to watch anything and everything out there) and I know that some of the better ones are not afraid to tackle some very serious and dark themes. This isn't one of the better ones, and that's possibly down to MacDonald not having faith in the audience. Or it's weak source material that nobody decided to overhaul. Either way, this is one to avoid unless you've exhausted most of your other viewing options.
4/10
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