Review: Kid zombies take over in 'Cooties'

Horror-comedy Cooties is one of those ideas that works better in theory than it does as a full feature-length film.

Clint (Elijah Wood), a struggling writer living at home in Fort Chicken, Ill., with his mom (Philly's Kate Flannery), takes on an elementary English class to make some extra dough.

It's a bad first day, not just because Clint would rather be finishing his novel, but also because a batch of bad chicken nuggets has made its way to the school, infecting a pigtailed youngster with a virus that turns her into a bloodthirsty attack-zombie. She, in turn, transforms the rest of the student body into bloodthirsty killers.

Clint bands together with other teachers - the comely Lucy (The Newsroom's Alison Pill) and her gym teacher boyfriend Wade (The Office's Rainn Wilson), among others - to fend off the murderous tots, who, as one uninfected student puts it, have cooties.

The best horror movies are the ones that slyly throw in an underlying metaphor about the current state of society without bashing, and Cooties had the perfect premise to do that. But other than a few jokes about the overuse of Ritalin, it stays away from making any kind of statement about education - other than that teaching is a difficult, underrated profession. There are fewer ideas truer than that one, but it still feels like an opportunity squandered to actually say something.

That's a quibble, and not the only squandered part of Cooties. The script is full of running gags that never land, yet continue to run. Horror vet Leigh Whannell, who also wrote the script, plays creepy science teacher Doug, a fount of these flat jokes.

Once the teachers start leaving the school late in the third act, Cooties begins to get a bit fun. But what could have been an amusing and entertaining zombie flick is, instead, a slog.

StartText

Directed by Jonathan Milott, Cary Murnion. With Elijah Wood, Alison Pill, Rainn Wilson, Jack McBrayer, Nasim Pedrad. Distributed by Lionsgate.

Running time: 1 hour, 28 mins.

Parent's guide: R (horror violence and gore, language including sexual references, some drug use).

Playing at: PFS at the Roxy.EndText

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@mollyeichel