NIGHT OF THE ZOOPOCALYPSE - Mark Reviews Movies

Night of the Zoopocalypse, Viva Kids

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | March 6, 2025

Looking at Night of the Zoopocalypse as what might be a child's first experience with a horror movie, that kid could do worse. It's an oddly fun exercise to watch the film through adult eyes, though, because one is keenly aware that directors Ricardo Curtis and Rodrigo Perez-Castro have both kinds of audience members in mind here.

The kids will likely find plenty of scares, as cute, computer-animated animals are threatened, chased, and attacked by their fellow creatures, which have been transformed into rubbery, glowing monsters by an alien presence. The adults, however, get to laugh, because we know those adorable, oddball animals aren't in any real danger, since this is material aimed at children. Plus, we can see more clearly how the directors have made a legitimate scare-ride for younger audiences, using camera angles and staging tactics that everyone apart from those inexperienced kids will know quite well.

Take the first scene in which one of those mutated animals hunts some perfectly normal but soon-to-be transformed ones. A sinisterly shimmering space object has crashed in a zoo after a busy day of guests gawking at animals in their assorted enclosures. The rock has landed in the petting zoo area, designed like a barn—that familiarly standard locale of movies about slashers, aliens, or some other unwelcome invader wreaking havoc on unsuspecting victims.

A very, very cute little bunny—with eyes that are almost as big as its head, a fluffy tail, and a heart-shaped nose—eats what remains of the rock after its trip through the atmosphere and its destructive course through the rest of the zoo. It has, after all, landed at the top of a pile of peanuts, so the bunny digs in, falls over, and begins emitting an electrical charge.

That's the setup, but the real scene of note happens soon after. The bunny is now in a cocoon or pod, and as all of the other pet-worthy animals peacefully slumber and snore, a gangly arm with a clawed paw emerges from the pod. It starts hunting, and Curtis and Perez-Castro keep the camera at oppressively low angles as the monstrous thing drags itself across the ground and up the walls, trying to nab any rabbits, sheep, goats, and other sweet animals it can.

This sequence is quite amusing for those old enough to get the joke, and in a strange way, it's funnier still, because we can also imagine how potentially frightening kids might find the sight of a diabolical hand trying to grab a bunch of cute little critters. It's not funny that children might be terrified, obviously, but it is to observe how cleverly the filmmakers have set out to scare kids within the safe, innocent confines of what could possibly be their first horror movie.

Like most horror stories, the plot is basically an excuse for more scenes of a similar nature, although there are enough jokes and eccentric characters to remind kids that it's all meant to be in good fun. Meanwhile, the screenplay by Steven Hoban and James Kee (based on a concept by Clive Barker, which gives it some set of horror bona fides) is as self-aware as the direction, so an older audience can appreciate that the film is having fun with its premise and at its own expense.

Our protagonists are a group of animals who survive the initial invasion/outbreak. They include Gracie (voice of Gabbi Kosmidis), the youngest member of the pack in the wolf habitat, and Dan (voice of David Harbour), a newly arrived mountain lion at the zoo that has spent its life in the wild. After both of their enclosures are damaged by the meteorite, the two find themselves in the zoo's veterinary clinic with a lemur named Xavier (voice of Pierre Simpson). The primate has a bad habit of injuring itself just so it can spend the night in the clinic, where it can watch all sorts of movies—including late-night horror fare, of course—on the TV in there.

As the fog-drenched, neon-lit zoo becomes overrun by the mutated animals, some others, including an ostrich named Ash (voice of Scott Thompson) and a proboscis monkey named Felix (voice of Paul Sun-Hyung), take shelter in the clinic, and soon enough, the survivors split up into groups, trying to evade the monsters, find a way to escape, or cure their fellow beasts of the menacing alien infection. Eventually, Gracie and Dan have to also protect Poot (voice of Christina Nova), a pygmy hippo that's too naïve to see the alien invasion as anything other than a game.

The character design and animation here are as off-beat as the characterizations of these goofy protagonists, so there's some consistency in that element. Then, there are the monsters themselves, which seem fairly basic until our heroes start doing some damage to them. One doesn't expect a kid-friendly horror movie to feature dismemberment, let alone several instances of it, but that is the case here. Since it's all relatively innocent, those limbs and appendages do reassemble, though, leading to some dementedly unique arrangements of body parts or, as things progress, hybrid mutations of two or animals merging together.

Night of the Zoopocalypse is a mostly successful hybrid unto itself, too, in a few key ways. It's a horror comedy that is both theoretically scary (since it's only meant to give kids a couple of frights) and pretty funny, and the film works in both of those modes for two very different segments of the audience. That's an accomplishment.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download)