tek's rating:

Zapped, on Disney Channel
Disney Channel Wiki; Disney Wiki; IMDb; Made for TV Movie Wiki; MarVista Entertainment; Muse Entertainment; TV Tango; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Disney+; Google Play; Hulu; iTunes; YouTube

This first aired in 2014, but I didn't see it until 2018, on DVD. It's based on a book called "Boys Are Dogs," which I've never read. So... there's this girl named Zoey Stevens (Zendaya), whose mother, Jeannie, has just married a guy named Ted. (I got the impression that Jeannie is widowed, but I have no idea whether Ted is, um, widowered or divorced.) Ted has three sons named Adam, Zach, and Ben, as well as a dog named Humphrey. And Zoey has trouble getting used to all these new males in her life. (Honestly, I can't blame her. None of them are bad guys, but... they're obviously hard to live with.) Anyway, on her first day at her new high school, she is befriended by a girl named Rachel (who is probably my favorite character in the movie). She also meets a guy named Jackson, who seems fairly cool. But his ex-girlfriend, Taylor, sees them together, and takes an immediate dislike to Zoey. (She thinks Zoey is flirting with Jackson, which isn't really true. Of course he does soon become a love interest for Zoey, but initially Taylor is just being jealous for no reason. Well, she never really has a reason, because it's pretty clear that Jackson wouldn't want to be with her whether he was interested in Zoey, or anyone else, or not.)

Anyway. Zoey downloads an app to her phone that is supposed to make dogs obey her commands. It works on Humphrey at first, but then he takes her phone and drops it in the tub. (Part of me wondered if he did this intentionally because he knew the phone was controlling him, but that's unlikely, because he's just a dog. And this isn't the kind of movie that portrays dogs as anything more than dogs.) A sequence of events then... affects the phone... and the app stops working on Humphrey, instead causing human boys (and men) to obey Zoey's commands. It doesn't take her long to figure this out, and she uses it to make her stepfather and stepbrothers... not so insufferable. Meanwhile, Zoey and Rachel both audition for the school's dance team, the captain of which, unfortunately, is Taylor. She puts the two of them on the junior varsity team, which is just four boys who are pretty unskilled. But Zoey uses her phone app to make them better dancers. And this leads to a dance-off between the Varsity and J.V. teams.

And... I'm not sure what else to say. It's a fairly amusing movie, I guess. And... Wikipedia mentions a post-credits scene which is not on my DVD.


DCOM index