‘Cooties’ is a cheerfully transgressive horror comedy mash-up

You might call kids ‘little monsters’ from time to time, but ‘Cooties’ makes it literal.

Source: Distributor

People straight up react badly when you kill kids.

In movies, I mean. Even horror movies: it’s okay to threaten kids and to put them in danger – that’s a staple element in everything from 1955’s sublime The Night of the Hunter to Netflix fave Stranger Things – but actually committing to the bit is frowned upon. After Spielberg fed little Alex Kintner to Bruce the shark in Jaws he held off on pedicide until Schindler’s List, and that was a much more sombre affair. Of the current crop of A-list directors only Guillermo del Toro seems to be okay with it (Mimic, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth all send young’uns to the great beyond).

Cooties, a brisk little horror comedy, was never destined to breathe the same rarefied air as the Oscar-worthy works of Spielberg and del Toro, but if your metric is “number of dead kids” it is well ahead of the pack. Directed by Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion with a script by Ian Brennan (Glee) and Australia’s own Leigh Whannell (Saw), who both co-star, Cooties gives its characters license to dispatch a school’s worth of kids by the simple expedient of turning all the little monsters into zombies.

Our hero is depressed wannabe writer Clint (Elijah Wood), who has returned to his tiny hometown of Fort Chicken after failing to make it in the Big Apple. Taking a gig as a substitute teacher, he finds himself working alongside his high school crush, Lucy (Alison Pill), and earning the ire of her boorish gym teacher boyfriend, Wade (Rainn Wilson adding to his repertoire of overconfident jerks).

It all starts out calmly for Clint Hadson (Elijah Wood) Source: SpectreVision / Glacier Films

Clint’s failures in life are weighing heavily on him, but they take a backseat after a contaminated chicken nugget in the school cafeteria turns one young girl into a flesh-hungry ghoul. The zombie plague rips through the school like nits and before you can say “

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” Clint, Lucy, Wade and the other surviving teachers, which include 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer and Chad’s Nasim Pedrad are barricaded in the teacher’s lounge and figuring out what school equipment might best be used to off the cannibalistic kids.

Cooties definitely puts the focus on comedy more than horror, as you’d probably guess from a cast like that, but there’s a frisson of the forbidden to the proceedings simply because the killing of kids is such taboo. Even in a genre movie, even played for laughs, even with the narrative excuse that they’re all zombies, there’s a real sense of risk in the mix as our team of teachers arm up.

And soon enough the screams start... Source: SpectreVision / Glacier Films

Cooties does not skimp on the gore gags. Skulls are crushed, faces torn open, and at one point Wilson’s Wade arms himself with a baseball launcher as a kind of makeshift machine gun, mowing down zombies with abandon. The kids, for their part, give as good as they get; a baby gnaws its mother’s face off, while the vice principal, played by Brennan, is torn apart and disembowelled by a horde of ‘em in a clear and knowing nod to George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead.

Now, you might baulk at the very thought of a movie dedicated to zombie kids and their destruction, and that’s fair enough, but here’s the thing: one of the joys of spending your time in the weirder back alleys of the genre ghetto is the hope that you’ll see something genuinely new to you, something that mainstream cinema wouldn’t touch, and sometimes couldn’t even conceive of. Which isn’t to say that Cooties is the wildest film you’ll ever see, but hey – Frodo and Dwight are fending off zombie kids, that’s got to be worth something.