10/27: Little Monsters

I should get all caught up today, so here's yesterday's movie:

10/27: Today's horror flick is another zombie comedy, Little Monsters. Now, I know we can all agree that the whole zombie comedy genre is beyond bloated, like some sort of... well... long-dead zombie, I guess. Only few of these are of a high caliber, like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, and then there's a massive pile of awful attempts at z-comedy strewn about like dead bodies. K, I'm done with the bad attempts at zombie jokes. Maybe. I dunno. We'll see. Little Monsters has some shining moments but ends up falling somewhere in between the two extremes.

Do you remember when your friend who was a film student asked you to be a zombie extra in the pretty awful zombie comedy movie he was making when you were in college? I think that's a pretty common experience we all have as human beings. Well, Little Monsters is pretty much that movie, but your film student buddy somehow managed to write a pretty decent script and get some pretty killer actors for the leads while skimping on basically everything else. There's some solid jokes, some fun situations, but there's just too much missing to make it a great movie. 

Little Monster's strength lies in its laughs, which are super solid, and Lupita Nyong'o's performance. My wife teaches elementary school and just kept laughing at how much she nailed being a Kindergarten teacher: all songs, smiles, fun games, and doing anything for your kids, including keeping them from being eaten by zombies. All the usual stuff. Unfortunately everything else is pretty weak; the movie has no attitude, from soundtrack (maybe Zombieland ruined me, but there needed to be a kick ass soundtrack here) to some forced jokes that fell flat (sadly, Josh Gad, who I love, couldn't breathe life into his children's TV show character) to a lack of awesome zombie kills (c'mon. That's what we're all here for). Ultimately if Little Monsters could have gone just a bit further than some good jokes it could have risen up to the top of the z-comedy elite, but as it stands it just falls short. It's decent and that's it.

7/10