This plays like the final class project at a second rate community college. It’s barely worthy of direct-to-video.
The story, what little there is, could be guessed from the title. A bunch of monotone no-charisma cheerleaders go to camp to hone their skills. Three dullard guys wander to a nearby cabin and a zombie squirrel attacks. Slowly, and I mean slowly, the zombie plague spreads. There are long stretches of yawn where they try being funny. Except for one joke involving pot near the end, the pathetic attempts at humor are like tinny music falling on tone deaf ears.
When there are zombies and gore it sometimes borders on fun. One kill with a chainsaw isn’t too bad. There’s an okay decapitation of a topless cheerleader. But clunky direction ultimately sabotages. The music sounds like a sixth grader on a cheap synthesizer.
The best part is the prologue. It’s told in a series of comic-like drawings with no dialogue. The artist, Ethan Wenberg, is talented. The Nazis invent a zombie serum which wrecks chaos in the lab. US Soldiers invade and take it. Pandemonium explodes in their lab. They put barrels of the green bubbling liquid in the side of a mountain and dynamite a rock slide to bury it. But sixty years later the squirrel gets inside. It’s an effective piece of pure visual storytelling. If the whole movie was this good, a promising gem would appear. Too bad this approach wasn’t integrated into the whole.
I love horror movies and wacko cult obscurities. I would love a cool movie with this title. However, “Zombie Cheerleading Camp” is z-budget amateur junk.
