#ryan mchenry

[stuff-diary]

Anna and the Apocalypse

Movies watched in 2022

Anna and the Apocalypse (2017, United Kingdom)

Director: John McPhail

Writers: Alan McDonald & Ryan McHenry (and songs by Roddy Hart & Tommy Reilly)

Mini-review:

This is such a fun concept! I have definitely never watched a Christmas-set musical about zombies before, and I have to say this genre mashup works shockingly well. The script is funny, the songs and the musical numbers are surprisingly good and all the zombie stuff is really well handled. The only flaw I could find is that it's a tad overlong and ends up dragging a bit, but I know I'll be recommending it as an original, fun and refreshing watch for the holiday season from now on.

[wcwit]

My most anticipated movie of the year finally has a decent trailer!

When I first heard about Anna and the Apocalypse, read that it’s a “Christmas, Zombie Musical” and saw how many positive reviews it got around the festival it played at, I knew I needed to see it as soon as possible

[theshortnews]

Join us for Scottish zombie Christmas fun! Show starts at 7:30!

[raspberrydee]

i love watching a ryan gosling movie and going ‘omg! this is the part where he won’t eat his cereal!’

[rhettakins]

Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)

Dir. John McPhail

A zombie apocalypse threatens the sleepy town of Little Haven - at Christmas - forcing Anna and her friends to fight, slash and sing their way to survival, facing the undead in a desperate race to reach their loved ones. But they soon discover that no one is safe in this new world, and with civilization falling apart around them, the only people they can truly rely on are each other.

[movie-titlecards]

Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)

My rating: 7/10

Fewer songs than I thought there'd be, and the whole tone is a lot bleaker than you'd expect in a Christmas zombie musical, but it's still pretty good fun overall.

[davidosu87]

[reactingtosomething]

Anna and the Apocalypse is a zombie musical with designs on your heart

Zombies, musicals, Christmas, high school: four flavors that taste great together!

The keystone holding it all together — and the thing that really gives the movie its charm instead of simply feeling thin — is that each genre facet is treated with the same degree of seriousness.

Crushes are just as life-threatening as flesh-hungry zombies are (which, let’s face it, is how crushes generally feel in real life). There are the occasional potshots at modern technology, but nothing so egregious as the way millennials are generally blamed for rotting their own brains (get it). Sure, these kids are worried about things that are fairly unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but they’re allowed to be, and the film’s turn from comedy to drama in its last stretch wouldn’t work without that sense of investment.

The songs and laughs don’t come at the expense of those key zombie movie ingredients, death and gore. Anyone worried that Anna and the Apocalypse might skimp on bloody fun: there’s more Shaun of the Dead in its DNA than High School Musical. The zombies go hand in hand with the high school drama rather than being an accessory to it, and the two are inextricably tied together by the film’s end.

by Karen Han

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