Directors: Jonathan Milott, Cary Murnion
Cast: Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson, Alison Pill, Leigh Whannell, Jorge Garcia
Certificate: 15
Running Time: 85 minutes
Everyone and their grandmother seems to have gotten onto the zombie bandwagon. Even computer game series Call of Duty has a special level devoted to eradicating zombie hoards and The Walking Dead is one of the most successful television shows in the world right now. The common factors in most zombie films are the apocalypse and a dark atmosphere, so how can you make anything fresh? Well here comes Cooties which attempts to breathe life into the reanimated corpse genre and it mostly succeeds.
Playing heavily for laughs, Cooties is a black comedy that sees a group of teachers under siege when their elementary/primary school children succumb to a mystery virus. The disease is brought into school by one unsuspecting girl who the other children taunt as having ‘cooties’, hence the title. She contracts the virus after eating a tainted chicken nugget – it is one of the main food groups for children after all. As with any good zombie movie it is’t long until the infection spread, but in a new twist, only those who are pre-pubescent can contract the illness.
The faculty are made up of many familiar faces, the most famous being Elijah Wood. He’s been acting forever, seriously he made his first film when he was only eight, but is better known for serious affairs. To a legion of fans he is of course Frodo Baggins, a role which gets a cheeky reference during an exchange between Wood’s substitute teacher Clint and alpha male and P.E teacher Wade, played by Rainn Wilson. The rest of the cast is rounded up by Alison Pill, Jack McBrayer, Nasim Pedrad, Insidious‘s Leigh Whannell (who also writes) and Lost‘s Jorge Garcia. Whannell is especially brilliant as socially awkward science teacher Doug, whilst Wilson plays against type as a more-macho-than-macho man.
The kids of Cooties aren’t your archetypal zombies and are more of an exaggerated version of actual kids, they’re snotty, slimy and in several cases, darn right mean. The laughs come thick and fast from the start and the overall package is a fun, if not rather gooey and sticky affair.
Cooties arrives on Blu-Ray and DVD on 12th October.
