COOTIES
#31DaysOfHorror — October 2nd
This October, for the second year in a row, I’ll be reviewing one horror movie each day! Respected classics, trashy and forgotten B-movies, both new frights and old… I love ‘em all. Well, some of them I’ll probably hate. We’ll see.
‘Cooties’ (2015)
Directed by: Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion
Starring: Elijah Wood as “Clint”
Allison Pill as “Lucy”
Rainn Wilson as “Wade”
Nasim Pedrad as “Rebekkah”
Leigh Whannell as “Doug”
Cooper Roth as “Patriot”
The Plot
Wannabe horror writer Clint is having a pretty sucky Monday. He’s been called to substitute-teach at Fort Chicken Elementary, his old school, where he runs into Lucy, an old flame, and discovers that she’s dating a total jackass of a PE teacher named Wade. Clint’s novel-in-progress is about a man who buys a boat and doesn’t realize it’s “just the right amount of possessed,” and Wade won’t stop comparing it to Stephen King’s Christine. Feeling down on his luck and frustrated that his unfulfilling path in life has brought him back to the school he hated, he heads to class in time to watch a little girl eat a little boy’s face off.
Because, there’s a chicken nugget borne virus spreading rapidly through Fort Chicken Elementary, causing the children to transform from obnoxiously needy little idiots with no respect for authority, to obnoxiously needy little idiots with no respect for authority and an insatiable bloodlust! Armed with only what they can find in their classrooms, it’s up to Clint, Lucy, Wade, and the other teachers to destroy as many kid-zombies as they can in an attempt to escape the school and regain contact with the outside world.
My Review
It wasn’t an intentional decision to start out my #31DaysOfHorror experience this year with back-to-back movies about how terrible children can be, but the pairing of Cooties and Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest made a weird kind of sense. Cooties, for the record, is an infinitely better movie in just about every respect. It’s scarier when it wants to be, and when it’s going for humor, it nails the jokes more often than not… whereas the humor in Urban Harvest was pretty much entirely accidental.
I loved just about every single minute of Cooties. The humor is delightfully weird — chicken puns abound — and the fantastic cast really sells material that could have fallen flat on its face in other hands. The supporting teachers (aside from Clint, Lucy, and Wade) are rather one-note, but they all make the most of that note. In particular, Nasim Pedrad’s gun-happy right-wing nutjob character, Rebekkah, is brilliant, as is Jack McBrayer’s probably-gay Tracy who just can’t seem to stop talking about his tennis instructor’s balls. Cooties made me miss Nasim on SNL, and, well 30 Rock in general. Also, I was delighted to see Lost’s Jorge Garcia show up as a security guard who overdoses on mushrooms right as the bloody kiddy carnage breaks loose; he doesn’t do much other than sit in his truck looking absolutely terrified to his core, but he’s hysterical.
Zombie movies from Night of the Living Dead (the birth of the modern zombie) to 28 Days Later (the birth of the modern modern zombie, a.k.a., virus zombies who run) have lent themselves extremely well to political readings, and Cooties has an interesting approach to this staple of the genre befitting of its status as a horror-comedy.
Patient Zero in the film is a little girl; she’s the student who tries to eat another student’s face. But that student whose face gets eaten is the actual Big Bad zombie of the film — er, Little Bad? — and he’s the character who bears the brunt of the film’s slight movements toward political allegory. Post-9/11 zombie films have tended to cast zombies as terrorists, a kind of invading force that threatens to upend the traditional American way of life by disrupting it from within, but Cooties seems to be aiming for something a little different… because this evil little zombie-boy’s name is Patriot.
“I was born on September 11th,” he tells Clint by way of explanation. “God sent me on that day. That’s why, on my 18th birthday, I’m joining the Marines… just to kick some towelhead ass.”
“Wow,” Clint says, “there’s a lot to unpack there.”
Minutes later, Patriot viciously slaughters the school nurse and then spends the rest of the movie leading the zombie-children in an uprising against the teachers. Oo-rah!
So, let me unpack for a minute! Literally naming him “Patriot” is a joke, yes, but it functions as a joke about zombie movies having political agendas, as much as serving as an overt clue to whatever exists of the movie’s political ethos. It’s not particularly subtle, either — Cooties thinks the real danger to American society isn’t some nebulous threat from abroad, who hate us for our freedoms, but instead is a function of how we’re indoctrinating our children into blind patriotism that often masks outright racism. Later in the movie, several teachers in a row make grandiose, on-the-nose speeches about how unappreciated teachers are, and how they deserve respect and money because they’re the ones raising the kids, while the parents are off doing who-knows-what-else instead. It’s a nice inversion of the typical zombies-as-invading-force metaphor that a lot of zombie films strive for, and, well, it provides a great excuse to indulge in grown adults utterly destroying masses of annoying children.
Teachers have a lot of barely-suppressed rage about kids, I imagine, and Cooties is pure revenge fantasy for anyone who’s ever wished they could go beyond a simple reprimand when a kid gets out of line. Killing kids tends to be a no-no in American film, because it raises some icky ethical questions of using child actors in filming horrific situations, but Cooties just barrels right past any hesitation and goes for the gore. And wow, is the gory stuff gory. The creature effects are top-notch for such a low-budget film; while a lot of them did seem like CGI (particularly an effectively sickening hanging-jaw stunt at the end), there are some practical makeup moments that are just as phenomenal. Kids are gross! These kids are just a little more blatant about it.
My biggest complaint about Cooties is the third act. After a great setup and an even greater middle, with all of the teachers trapped together in the school while the kids pound at the windows and doors, Cooties goes off the rails a bit in having the teachers escape into the local town to find help. It tries to go broader, in making the scope of the epidemic reach far wider than the small town of Fort Chicken, and in doing so loses some of the hilariously claustrophobic feel of the beginning.
But, thankfully, the movie is rather short, and it doesn’t dwell on the outside-the-school sequences for very long before it’s over. All of the other elements make this a great horror-comedy, which is a traditionally an underrated genre — Cooties delivers on the scares and the laughs, which is a difficult mix to pull off. If Cooties eventually winds up on Netflix or some other widely-available streaming service, rather than sticking to OnDemand, I could see it having a long life as a cult favorite.
But, before you watch, don’t forget… circle, circle, dot, dot, give yourself a cootie shot.
← Yesterday: Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest
