It's a zombie drama, the young lead is charismatic, very pretty, very human and endlessly watchable, it establishes a world and a geography and situates the characters in it very well, all the unknown/little known actors throw themselves into the roles with passion and gusto... and then it's a bloody musical.

It was a legitimate creative choice on the part of the people who made it – and it was certainly better executed here than a similar idea in Joker: Folie à Deux – but if you know anything about me as a movie fan you know I hate musicals.

I'll execute the rest of this review as if the musical numbers didn't exist, and I have to hope there wasn't much they did to add to the plot except express the sentiments the characters founds themselves in a moment before they started, because after my jaw dropped and shoulders slumped the first time I fast forwarded through them all.

Anna (Ella Hunt) is a school senior in a pleasant enough but (to a late teenager) pretty boring Scottish town. She's experiencing discord with her Dad, who – after their wife/mum died a few years before – has high hopes for Anna's life starting with university, Anna wanting none of it and intending to take off for Australia for a gap year.

She's mildly aware her childhood best friend and confidante John (Malcolm Cumming) has always held a candle for her but she doesn't want to mess up what they have, and she's still smarting after a one night stand with Nick (Ben Wiggins), after which he wasn't very supportive or friendly.

They and their best friends, aspiring filmmaker Chris (Christopher Leveaux), his devoted and slightly oddball girlfriend Lisa (Marli Siu) and American exchange student Steph (Sarah Swire) are all going about their day toward the end of the school year, trying to steer clear of the fearsome, hateful principal Arthur (Paul Kaye) and reach Christmas intact.

But wouldn't you know it, a strange virus they've been hearing about on the news that turns people into hissing ghouls hungry for human flesh finally reaches Little Haven and the zombie apocalypse is on.

Between school, where Arthur has the faculty – including her dad, the janitor – holed up, the bowling alley where she and John work and the increasingly empty and bombed out township, the gang have to make their way back to their loved ones through the undead before they get eaten themselves.

Director John McPhail understands the genre and delivers an appreciable quotient of comedy blood and guts, and the script cares enough about the characters (and you will too) to make you aware and interested about their various predicaments as well as genuinely surprised you when some of them feel ignominious ends.

Good fund and well made... but still a musical.