The parents start to arrive for the students but the teachers lose hope once they see that a student viciously attacks and ends up killing one of the parents. Their only hope lies in the fact that the parents of the students will eventually come to pick them up because school will let out.
They realize that they need to barricade themselves away from all the infected children. Students all over the school succumb to the virus and the teachers begin to realize that the virus must not affect adults as it does children. After she attacks some fellow classmates, they realize she has been infected by something. The student quickly starts to experience numerous symptoms but others just assume that she is sick. The contamination happens when a student eats a chicken nugget that is covered in black splotches. The virus causes its victims to turn into zombie like creatures. An unlikely hero must lead a motley band of teachers in the fight of their lives.Cooties is a horror comedy about a virus outbreak in an Illinois elementary school. Starring: Elijah Wood, Alison Pill, Rainn Wilson, Jack McBrayer, Nasim Pedrad, Leigh WhannellĪ mysterious virus hits an isolated elementary school, transforming the kids into a feral swarm of mass savages. Saturday 1 January, 9:35pm, NITV / Now streaming at SBS On Demand Which isn’t to say that Cooties is the wildest film you’ll ever see, but hey – Frodo and Dwight are fending off zombie kids, that’s got to be worth something. Now, you might baulk at the very thought of a movie dedicated to zombie kids and their destruction, and that’s fair enough, but here’s the thing: one of the joys of spending your time in the weirder back alleys of the genre ghetto is the hope that you’ll see something genuinely new to you, something that mainstream cinema wouldn’t touch, and sometimes couldn’t even conceive of. The kids, for their part, give as good as they get a baby gnaws its mother’s face off, while the vice principal, played by Brennan, is torn apart and disembowelled by a horde of ‘em in a clear and knowing nod to George A. Skulls are crushed, faces torn open, and at one point Wilson’s Wade arms himself with a baseball launcher as a kind of makeshift machine gun, mowing down zombies with abandon. Even in a genre movie, even played for laughs, even with the narrative excuse that they’re all zombies, there’s a real sense of risk in the mix as our team of teachers arm up.Ĭooties does not skimp on the gore gags. The zombie plague rips through the school like nits and before you can say “ barleese” Clint, Lucy, Wade and the other surviving teachers, which include 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer and Chad’s Nasim Pedrad are barricaded in the teacher’s lounge and figuring out what school equipment might best be used to off the cannibalistic kids.Ĭooties definitely puts the focus on comedy more than horror, as you’d probably guess from a cast like that, but there’s a frisson of the forbidden to the proceedings simply because the killing of kids is such taboo. It all starts out calmly for Clint Hadson (Elijah Wood)Ĭlint’s failures in life are weighing heavily on him, but they take a backseat after a contaminated chicken nugget in the school cafeteria turns one young girl into a flesh-hungry ghoul.
Taking a gig as a substitute teacher, he finds himself working alongside his high school crush, Lucy (Alison Pill), and earning the ire of her boorish gym teacher boyfriend, Wade (Rainn Wilson adding to his repertoire of overconfident jerks). Our hero is depressed wannabe writer Clint (Elijah Wood), who has returned to his tiny hometown of Fort Chicken after failing to make it in the Big Apple.
#2014 MOVIE COOTIES ONLINE LICENSE#
Directed by Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion with a script by Ian Brennan ( Glee) and Australia’s own Leigh Whannell ( Saw), who both co-star, Cooties gives its characters license to dispatch a school’s worth of kids by the simple expedient of turning all the little monsters into zombies. Of the current crop of A-list directors only Guillermo del Toro seems to be okay with it ( Mimic, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth all send young’uns to the great beyond).Ĭooties, a brisk little horror comedy, was never destined to breathe the same rarefied air as the Oscar-worthy works of Spielberg and del Toro, but if your metric is “number of dead kids” it is well ahead of the pack.
After Spielberg fed little Alex Kintner to Bruce the shark in Jaws he held off on pedicide until Schindler’s List, and that was a much more sombre affair. Even horror movies: it’s okay to threaten kids and to put them in danger – that’s a staple element in everything from 1955’s sublime The Night of the Hunter to Netflix fave Stranger Things – but actually committing to the bit is frowned upon. People straight up react badly when you kill kids.