Sooner or later something bad, or WORSE, is gonna happen. It always does.

I watched this one for the first time last night, and honestly it was better than I expected. It's still an animated 'talking animals' movie for kids, but even if it is family friendly it's a loving homage to horror films.

First impressions were good. The score is this post-2010 80s inspired synthwave, the style you'd recognize from Stranger Things. And the visuals are gorgeous, we open to a vigorous chase scene through the misty woods with eerie green backlighting.

Actually the visuals and lighting deserve special mention. The zoo is covered in a perpetual light fog which diffuses the vibrant neon lighting used throughout. It leans heavily on a blue-red mix reminiscent of Dario Argento films, but it's also chock full of those Halloween special sickly greens and cosmic horror magentas.

The mechanism of infection starts from a glowing pink meteorite that crashes into the zoo. Patient Zero is exposed to the meteorite and turns into a pod creature before emerging as a gelatinous gum-beast. From there, any bite transmits the infection, and soon the zoo is overrun with gummy zombies. There is a cure for zombism, which is to be expected from a kids movie with an eventual return to the status quo.

The gumminess is pretty clever. I mean, how do you faithfully handle zombies in a kids movie? After all, a zombie movie tends to be the goriest sort of movie where people are eaten alive. As gummy creatures, the movie has carte blanche to show off dismemberments and slime in place of gore without being horrifying.

The gummy nature of the zombies leads to some really interesting creature design. Not only do you have a fairly diverse set of creatures because of all the different zoo animals, but you also get several animals combining themselves into mutant amalgamations reminiscent of John Carpenter's The Thing, and even a nod to Alien's Xenomorph.

Diverse creature design isn't limited just to the monsters. The main characters are fairly local to a Vancouver zoo as a timber wolf and mountain lion, but we also get an ostrich, capybara, lemur, pygmy hippo, and proboscis monkey (don't see too many of those) in the main cast. No gummy bears though, which is either a missed opportunity or they couldn't secure the trademark.

The lemur deserves special attention. Xavier is merely a supporting character, but he's the trope-aware movie buff. These guys are usually my favorite in movies, it's sort of a way to acknowledge that "yes, we are leaning on cliche, but that's part of the fun." A character like that also feels valuable for a kids-horror movie - the foreshadowing can take some of the bite out of the scares, and since the kids probably haven't seen a thousand horror movies it's good to have a guide.

Night of the Zoopocalypse is available to stream on Crave and Prime. It looks like you can get the full movie on Youtube from the distributor, although that version may be geo-locked.

Thanks for the review!