Delayed Reaction: Cooties

Premise: Contaminated chicken nuggets cause an outbreak of children turning into zombies at a small-town grade school.

 

I guess it was foolish of me to think that Cooties would measure up to the premise. I remember hearing about it when it premiered at Sundance in 2014. It sounded really fun. Zombie comedies have a lot of room for laughs. It's a high-pressure situation that brings the worst out of every character. Get a few talented comedic performers and let them go to town. Cooties has the added benefit of a really ridiculous zombie threat. It's just kids. One of my favorite absurd things on the internet is that there's a calculator that determines how many 5-year-olds you could take in a fight based on a few questions about your physical traits and aggression. Cooties taps into that same humor. It's just plain funny seeing adults in situations where children are genuine threats. So how could this movie miss?

 

I think Cooties does follow through with most of what it promises. There are absurd adults. It has fun with the idea of child zombies. It escalates to comically big stakes. So, I can really only be so negative about the movie. Where the movie lost me is with the characters. I didn't like any of them. Elijah Wood can be a hero and he can be a schmuck. He can't be both. He's a very sincere performer, which this movie doesn't use at all. I like Alison Pill, and I think this movie relies on the fact that I like Alison Pill rather than actually construct a fun character for her. I'm pretty convinced at this point that Rainn Wilson doesn't have comedic range. He's very good at Dwight Schruttes and that's about this. His character in this is a different shade of Dwight but without the time to flesh out the character. And, everyone else is pretty one note as well.

 

I keep comparing this in my mind to Little Monsters, which I found much better because the characters were much better. In that, Alexander England is able to pull off being a lovable loser. Lupita Nyong'o gets to shade her character, which easily could've been a generic female teacher/love interest role. Josh Gad even fully commits to how extreme his character is. Maybe I would've liked Cooties a lot more had I not seen a similar idea handled so much more effectively.

 

Also, I just don't respond to gross-out humor. I don't have that funny gene. I get nothing, for example, from jokes about a teacher going through stool samples without gloves. I think it's similar to how I don't respond to extreme realistic violence in horror. Saying "Eww" does nothing for me in a movie, and Cooties really enjoys that kind of humor. I do think that's more a matter of personal taste than ineffectiveness of the movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend