COOTIES (2014)

Genre: Horror/Comedy
Director: Jonathan Milott, Cary Murnion
Cast: Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson, Alison Pill, Jack MacBrayer, Leigh Whannell, Nasim Pedrad, Ian Brennan, Jorge Garcia
Runtime: 1 hr 28 mins
Rating: NC-16 (Violence and Coarse Language)
Released By: Golden Village Pictures
Official Website: http://cootiesmovie.tumblr.com/

Opening Day: 10 December 2015

Synopsis: From the twisted minds of Leigh Whannell (co-creator of Saw and Insidious) and Ian Brennan (co-creator of "Glee"), COOTIES is a horror comedy with unexpected laughs and unapologetic thrills. When a cafeteria food virus turns elementary school children into killer zombies, a group of misfit teachers must band together to escape the playground carnage.

Movie Review:

Because Scott Gimple and his team of writers at AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ have apparently sucked the air out of every thoughtful zombie drama, them feature film writers have instead tried to balance the quotient by going the way of comedy – though judging by the results of the recent ‘Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse’ as well as this latest from ‘Saw’ creator Leigh Whannell and ‘Glee’ creator Ian Brennan, they’d be better off letting the folks at AMC do all the walking. Neither scary enough as a horror film nor funny enough as a comedy, ‘Cooties’ instead settles for obvious gore beats, lame jokes, uninspired plot mechanics and a bunch of characters that we really just don’t give a damn about.

To be fair, it does start with a fiendishly clever premise: using a factory-to-table sequence over its opening credits, we see how an infected chicken is processed into chicken nuggets that end up being served at a cafeteria in an elementary school. In no time, the kids are turning each other into rampaging, flesh-eating zombies in the playground outside, while their teachers – made up of Elijah Wood’s dorky substitute Clint, Alison Pill’s relentlessly cheery Lucy, Rainn Wilson’s cocky gym trainer Wade, Whannell’s socially maladjusted sex-ed educator Doug among others – are forced to run from the little rotters within the school building.

Thanks to Doug, we are treated to some mumbo-jumbo about how the virus doesn’t take hold if you’ve already reached puberty, which is really no more than a convenient excuse to keep the kids the flesh-eaters and the teachers their meat. There is indeed some fun to be had in the role reversal between children and adults, which Whannell and Brennan milk for both macabre as much as pop-culture humour. Oh yes, this is that movie where what is meant to be funny is as much Doug’s proclamation that rap music is to be blamed for the outbreak as a scene where a zombie-fied grade-schooler uses a teacher’s severed head as her colouring board – and if that sounds distasteful to you, then you won’t very much like seeing a teacher beating another zombie-fied student to death.

Predictably, first-time feature directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion crank up the fake gore and violence to over-the-top proportions, but it is the name actors romping through the gross-out humour that bring the biggest laughs. Most prominently, Wood and Wilson play up their romantic rivalry for Pill to hilariously chauvinistic effect, bickering from face-to-face to over walkie-talkie even as they need to depend on each other to stay alive from the pint-sized monsters. As he did playing Specs in the ‘Insidious’ trilogy, Whannell often steals the show delivering the most inappropriate lines with a stone face, but that is also because the others like Jack McBrayer’s closeted art teacher and Nasim Pedrad’s paranoiac are given little else to do in comparison.

What starts out as twisted mayhem unravels itself just as quickly, and the film is ultimately not smart enough as satire on elementary-school kids turning against their day-time tormentors; instead, we get a lot of blood, equally if not more questionable violence, and occasional smatterings of laughs and frights. It is at best campy forgettable fun, and at worse an only half-alive horror-comedy hybrid that doesn’t do justice to either. 

Movie Rating:

(Turning elementary-school kids against their daytime tormentors may seem a fiendishly clever premise, but 'Cooties' is ultimately too ham-fisted and scattershot to make good on its satirical potential) 

Review by Gabriel Chong