Starring Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller, and Joey Morgan. Rated 18A. Now playing.

These days you can barely swing a chainsaw without hitting a zombie-based movie or TV show, but Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse doesn't further the undead cause one iota. It's a horror-comedy that fails to elicit chuckle one.

The prospect of laughs looks good when the flick opens with Blake Anderson from TV’s hilarious Workaholics causing havoc at a bio lab. But it’s established early on that over-the-top gore will be the main focus when his goofball janitor unwittingly forces both his hands into the belly of an infected research subject.

Soon after we're introduced to a teenaged scout group made up of good-hearted Ben (Tye Sheridan), randy troublemaker Carter (Logan Miller), and chubby nerd Augie (Joey Morgan). After a nonsensical scene where Ben hits a zombie deer with his dad’s car and gets a flat tire, he and Carter make plans to leave Augie at a camp-out and sneak off to a secret high-school seniors’ party in search of romance/pussy.

But before they can do that the zombie outbreak occurs, so they team up with a shotgun-toting strip-bar waitress (Sarah Dumont) and use their weapon-enhanced scouting skills to try and save the day. Gross-out sight gags ensue.

The filmmakers try in vain to inject humour into the proceedings by having 89-year-old Cloris Leachman play a cat-crazed old hag who’s freaky even without the virus. Then there’s the part where Ben is dangling off a roof, hanging on to the penis of a zombie senior that stretches, stretches, and strrrrreeeetches until you get to see in vivid detail what Johnny Knoxville’s character managed to avoid in Bad Grandpa.

You could call that the highlight, unfortunately.