I can’t stop talking about ‘Zombies 3’
Spoiler warning: This is going to have a lot of spoilers about the movie Zombies 3, so if you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t read this yet. But also this is Zombies 3 so I doubt anyone minds.
The moment is finally here, the third and final installment of the Disney Channel Original Movie franchise, Zombies, came out this weekend and my friend and I, along with other children across the country, sat down to watch this trilogy come to an end. And man, like the first two movies in this series, Zombies 3 was a wild fucking ride.
To those of you who don’t know too much about Zombies, the movies take place in a town called Seabrook, which is painted as a “perfect town.” Everyone wears pastels, sings and dances their way through emotions, and high school cheerleading is a super big deal (the Mighty Shrimp never lose). The only thing that is imperfect about Seabrook is that outside its tall walls, there is a community of zombies that live there. See, about 50 years ago an accident happened at the Seabrook Power Plant and turned half of the population into man-eating zombies. That sounds scary, but with the power of technology the government created these bracelets called Z-bands which suppresses the “zombie” part of zombies, so now they’re just regular people with pale skin and green hair who like to eat animal guts sometimes.
For some reason, Seabrook High for the first time ever allows some of the zombies from Zombietown to attend high school there. Zed, who is the zombie protagonist of this story, is a zombie who wants nothing more than to have a fun and regular high school experience—he especially wants to join the football team, which is the most regular thing a high schooler can do. When he and his friends get to Seabrook High, though, they find that the zombie portion of the school is completely separated from the human side of the school. There’s a fence separating the two entrances and the zombies have to attend class and zombies have class in the school basement (yes, the human/zombie dynamic is supposed to represent real-world racism).
At school, Zed meets the cheerleader and main human girl character, Addison, and the two of them instantly fall in love with each other in the time it takes to sing a song (did I mention this movie is a musical?). Addison is your typical Seabrook girl—she made it to the cheer team, her cousin Bucky is the cheer captain, and her mom is the mayor. She’s got one big secret, though: her hair isn’t blonde! She naturally has snow-white hair that is impossible to dye. To fit in, her parents tell her to wear a blonde wig everywhere because the one thing you can’t do in Seabrook is look even slightly not normal. While Zed and all the other zombies are trying to be treated as equals in the society they live in against all the discrimination they’ve faced as a people for decades, Addison wants to find a place to belong to because her hair is a weird color (this is very important for the next two movies).
Without explaining the whole first movie (this is about the third movie after all!), after some of the normies in Seabrook try to sabotage the Z-bands to prove that zombies are “dangerous,” Addison helps bridge the gap between humans and zombies by showing she has white hair and suddenly zombies are cool and are accepted. The wall separating Seabrook and Zombietown is taken down and racism is over! Yes!!
The second movie is similar except the new monsters are werewolves. Addison, having white hair, is trying to find a group of people to accept her. The wolves think she might be one of them, but she is not. Zed also runs for student body president and tries to get the wolves to assimilate into Seabrook culture instead of embracing their unique way of living. The werewolves are supposed to be a stand-in for Indigenous people but it doesn’t work very well, once again. The werewolves are fucking cool though and have the best outfits and songs. They all go to the Prawn (the shrimp version of prom) at the end.
At the end of the sequel as a little teaser we see Addison falling asleep and something flying in the sky from the window. This is a little foreshadowing as to what the new monster that will appear in the next movie is. I said aliens right away and two years later I was proven CORRECT. First spoiler: it’s aliens.
The film opens with Zed explaining that Seabrook is now a perfect place for humans and monsters to coexist—but the rest of the world is behind. Zed, being an incredible football player, needs to help his team win the football game that night or then he won’t be admitted into Mountain College (the only college that exists because Addison is going there). This is how all college applications work. You wait two months before graduating to apply to a school and they make you play football for them. Anyways, since Zed is the only person who can break the glass ceiling for all zombiekind and he needed everything to go right that day, everything did not go alright. Aliens rolled up into town, and while they come in peace, they destroy most of downtown. The song about the alien invasion is really good.
The aliens are looking for a map that was left here on Earth that will tell them where the next perfect planet to live on will be. Their planet went extinct after an aversion to conflict (they suppress their emotions and don’t like to have conflict) destroyed the environment. They all have blue hair and have futuristic outfits. They are told that the map is found in Seabrook’s “most precious thing.” Even though this town is very open and accepting to some monsters, the Z-patrol (their police) are quite hostile to them at first. Without knowing what cheer is, they see a poster for Addison’s cheer competition and they say they’re here to enroll in the contest. Now nobody can kick them out of town while they do their secret investigation to find Utopia.
While some people are trying to be welcoming to the new residents of Seabrook, it gets hard because the aliens are so annoying and good at everything. They are able to learn an entire school’s curriculum in twenty minutes, they can levitate, and they all read each other’s minds all the time. To maximize efficiency in their world, they even suppress all emotions but decide that having emotions would be fun while on Earth. This part of the movie was pretty fun since each alien tapped into a different part of the human experience—one of them started to get angry about everything, another became super competitive (and kept winning obviously), and one even fell in love with Zed for a bit and did not understand monogamy. The wolves especially did not trust the aliens after they tried to fuck with the Moonstone (the wolf lifeforce), and sang one of the best songs on the soundtrack about hating the aliens.
As an aside here, the aliens live on something called the Mothership. The Mothership is voiced by RuPaul. Imagine your smart house being RuPaul. Anyways.
Addison and Zed, being the accepting people they are, help the aliens on their mission. During their investigation they recover a corrupted file from the alien scout that led them here and it’s revealed that that alien is none other than Addison’s grandma! Apparently once she crashed on Earth, fell in love with a human guy, and decided to stay there her hair turned white (yes, just like Addison’s hair). We’ve figured it out, guys! Addison is half-alien and she’s finally found a group of monsters that she biologically is a part of. Her dreams are all coming true!
Unfortunately for Addison, she can’t activate this stone thing with alien powers, so the aliens say, “Sorry girl! We can’t let you into our club even if you’re half alien!” This obviously crushes Addison because even though she’s beloved by pretty much every zombie, human, and werewolf in town, that’s just not enough for her. After playing around with the stone thing, her powers end up activating in the end and her hair turns blue. She is proven to be a true alien! Her mom also confirms that she is in fact part alien too, and has been hiding her white hair under a wig her whole life (which is so wild to me since she’s done things like swimming and giving birth! The dad had no clue which means that they definitely have a lackluster sex life let’s be honest).After all this, it turns out that “the most precious thing” in Seabrook is Addison herself. If the aliens want to find Utopia, Addison has to come with them on the ship, leaving her home forever.
This is where one of my biggest gripes with the movie comes from. This movie is made for kids (even though I am a 28 year-old fan), which means that there are lessons about life and growing up and all that. The main lesson throughout these movies is that “prejudice is bad” (which they somehow do kind of a bad job at doing), but there are other themes about love and finding community. Throughout all three movies, Addison is searching for a place where she can “belong.” It doesn’t matter that she has her family (who to be fair, are very “normal” so I can understand why she doesn’t vibe with them too much), she’s all the zombies’ favorite person, and the wolves consider her “part of the pack.” She is so desperate to feel included but if she just looked around she would realize that her whole community is a hodge-podge of all the people in Seabrook who love her! That’s some found family shit! And we love that!
But no, instead Addison is ready to give up everything to follow a group of aliens who are somewhat related to her by blood. Sure, her hair is blue and she wears the futuristic uniform but she barely knows any of these people and is ready to leave her home for them, just because they share some blood. That is a wild choice, Addison!
After a while on the Mothership, the aliens are still struggling to find the coordinates of their new perfect planet. That’s when Addison realizes that the “perfect planet” they were looking for all along was the “imperfectly perfect” Earth. Sure there’s conflict and emotions, but that’s what makes life all the more worthwhile, right? They turn around and head back home, right in time for graduation. After a whole lot of trouble, Zed actually does get accepted into Mountain College so he has effectively broken the glass ceiling for all monsters trying to get into higher education and he can spend all that time with the love of his life, alien Addison.
Now here is my second main problem with this movie. In an earlier part, there is this song that Zed and Addison sing together called “Ain’t No Doubt About It” where the two of them end up dancing through dangerous things like construction zones and archery practice, avoiding having to confront any danger or conflict, while the song has Zed talking about how they will be together forever and Addison basically saying, “Hey! I’m only 17 and I like you a lot but things can always change, right?” This is a great thing for a children’s movie to bring up because unlike a regular DCOM, most high school couples don’t make it past the first few months in college/adulthood and that is a totally normal thing that happens all the time! (Not me, though, but I never was in love in high school). The movie was teasing this idea that maybe Addison and Zed won’t end up together, that maybe during her time away they drift apart and move on from each other and when she comes back they’re obviously still friends but things change. But nope, they’ve been waiting for each other because they’re soulmates. I like them together, and I know that I’m asking a lot for a Disney Channel movie, but come on! Do something a little different! Show kids that a happily ever after is simply unrealistic!
I get it, though. When the DCOM formula forbids a couple from kissing in the first movie, and mandates an almost-break-up in the second movie, the third movie is made for planting a big ol’ kiss on each other—which they do.
There are some tiny details in this film that I also just love. When we first meet Bonzo in the original movie, he only speaks in Zombie so we never know what he’s saying but the zombies around him do. By the third movie he’s dating Addison’s best friend, Bree, who is human and even though he’s been around humans for so long, still only speaks Zombie. Instead of making him learn English, his new friends instead just learned his language so they can communicate and I just love that detail.
There also is a part where Addison refers to one of the aliens, A-spen, using “they/them” pronouns and it threw me for a loop because at first I thought she was talking about the aliens as a whole, but after doing a double-take confirmed that she was talking about one person. A-spen, after falling in and out of love with Zed so fast, is excited to come back to earth because they have fallen in love with another person, the leader of the werewolves, Willa. This is the first queer relationship I’ve ever seen in a DCOM, and while it is a small little blip in a story about two aggressively heterosexuals, it was cute to see. I wish I saw more of them interact during the movie itself instead of it seeming like a thing to just stick onto the end, but as Zed says in Zombies 1, “Baby steps is still movement.” (God kill me). There needs to be a spin-off where all the gay people at Seabrook are just gay. (Look at Bucky, look at the werewolves, look at the aliens—there’s so many of them!)
Also when they reprised the song “Someday” from the first movie when Zed and Addison were apart and being sad, singing, “Sounds like a fantasy / Oh, what could go so wrong / With a girl and a zombie.” It really just tug at my heartstrings, as a musical should.
I can’t believe that I spent my whole Monday writing over four pages on Google Docs about Zombies 3, but I really have not been able to think of anything else for the past day and a half. Is Zombies 3 better than the first two Zombies movies? Not even close. The story is weaker than the other ones and the songs are less good. My friend Rachel (who I watched this with) can vouch for me when I say that I predicted every plot point of the movie while it was happening. Is that inherently a bad thing? No! This is a Disney Channel movie for kids and I’ve been watching these things for over twenty years now—there’s a formula for these things and that is okay! Also it is expected that the third movie in a trilogy is worse than the other two because it is the third and it’s supposed to wrap everything up nicely because these movies are meant for children.
Even so, this was such a fun watch. The Zombies franchise is absolutely a wild ride from start to finish. There are some bops throughout (nothing is going to be as cool as the zombie party song from the first movie, though) and it’s an overall good time. You just can’t think too hard about it.