Cooties is, for the first hour, a refreshingly odd take on zombie movies. The idea is that infected chicken carries a virus that only turns kids (it leaves adults with a nasty, short-lived flu) – turning a fort chicken grade school into a scene of mostly humorous carnage.
The film comes from SpectreVision, the production company co-founded by Elijah Wood – who also co-stars – to make low-budget genre movies of the sort he grew up enjoying.
Wood plays Clint, a would-be writer who’s moved home from New York to work on his first novel – a horror story about a guy and a possessed boat – but has to work as a substitute teacher to pay the bills. On his first day at work, he reconnects from a high school friend, Lucy (Allison Pill), who happens to work at the same school – and their conversation evokes jealously in her boyfriend, Wade (Rainn Wilson), the school’s P.E. teacher.
We briefly meet some of the other school staff – Vice-Principal Simms (the film’s co-writer, Ian Brennan), a martinet who collects his staff’s phones because he wouldn’t want to make the students give up theirs if the teachers kept theirs; Tracy (Jack McBrayer) the obviously gay teacher; Rebekkah (Nasim Pedrad), the very Christian teacher; and Doug (the film’s other co-writer, Leigh Whannell), the teacher with slight mental health issues.
In Clint’s first class, he gets saddled with a troublemaker named Patriot (Cooper Roth), a bully who – fittingly – is the second victim of the virus that turns kids into something else when he provokes a classmate (Chloe Rose) just as she’s turning and she bites a chunk out of his cheek before running out of the class.
By the time recess comes, most of the kids have changed – to horror of Clint, Lucy and the others – except for Wade, who’s shooting baskets and is completely oblivious, and Rick, a member of the janitorial staff who’s not sure if he’s seeing is somehow being caused by the mushrooms he’s been doing in his airbrushed van.
Most of Cooties’ early humor comes from kid zombies not being taken seriously and the mayhem that arises from that unlikely scenario, but once it’s clear what’s happening, the movie settles into more familiar rhythms – albeit with both humor and horror coming from the sheer contrast between the zombie kids and the freaked out adults.
One series of genuinely funny revelations comes as the teachers, huddled in the safety of a locked room, share their secret desires – the things they’ve most wanted since they were kids themselves. In some cases, those desires seem perfect and in others, not so much.
Wood does a fine job with Clint, a guy who’s never done a brave thing in his life but comes through in the clutch – while Wilson’s Wade is a figure who dwells on past glories before realizing the time has come for him to up his game once more.
While McBrayer and Pedrad do well with their seriously underwritten characters, Whannell makes the most of quiet, haunted Doug, whose mental challenges come from a bizarre childhood accident but makes him a reservoir of unexpected knowledge.
Brennan and Whannell’s script fares best when the kids are first turning and then when the action is in enclosed spaces within the school. When things open up a bit, it loses momentum – though the climax is one that works both in terms of horror and comedy.
Directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion deliver a fast-paced film that, initially, plays with conventions in unexpected ways even while, for the most part, adhering to them. They make the most of what has to be a micro-budget by clever use of props and appliances and judicious editing.
They also get performances from their cast that exceed the writing and keep the film from falling apart once it begins to lose focus. Cooties succeeds most of the time – and when it does, it really does.
Final Grade: B