Cooties – A Review

From the first time I saw the trailer for this movie several months ago, I knew I wanted to see it. Rarely do I turn down a chance to see a zombie movie, and this one looked hilarious!

I got my wish a couple weekends ago. My husband and I were trolling the On Demand listings to see what was new to watch, and nothing looked promising. Then, my eyes drifted over the Cooties listing. I squealed with joy.

The basic premise of the film is that anyone who hasn’t reached puberty can turn into a zombie. It follows some teachers and a couple students as they try to survive the rising of the horrible little monsters.

The film had great special effects and a lot of humor—that is one of the reasons I wanted to see it in the first place. My spouse and I still repeat a lot of the lines from it; that’s the kind of impact it had.

On the surface, it is a fun movie full of child zombie carnage. There weren’t any parts that made me jump, but I may also be numb to that. I laughed from beginning to end, and I didn’t feel there were any slow parts in the film.

On a deeper level, the film makes some great comments about teachers and the students they have to deal with. There’s some great insight into the issues they deal with on a daily basis and how what they do is taken for granted. In one scene, while the teachers are huddled in the basement formulating a plan of how they are going to get away from the kids, they talk about how much they love their jobs—despite the fact that their friends and family question their choice of profession.

I have a deep, profound respect for teachers (I grew up with one), and I can only imagine what they have to go through on a daily basis. They’re underpaid and taken for granted, and yet they’re the ones who are educating and inspiring the next greats in our world. Even though they might not have to deal with undead kids, they have to put up with a host of other things.

There’s also some comments about where school food comes from, but I’m not going to delve too deeply into that. I don’t want to ruin the movie!

But if you want to enjoy this movie on a superficial level, that’s completely possible. As I said, it was highly entertaining.

As per most zombie films, it even had some of the regular stereotypes. The most prominent would be the stereotype of science and scientists. While the scientist character wasn’t wearing a white lab coat, he had difficulties being social and interacting with his fellow teachers. The first time we meet him in the teacher’s lounge, he’s reading a book on how to interact with others through conversation. Then we see his pathetic attempt to put that advice into action.

This leads to him being the comic relief in the film and the authority on the zombies.

As the film progresses, he’s the only character that has the ability to figure out what’s going on. His social ineptitude, which was caused by an accident when he was a kid, gave him a lot of time to study anatomy and other sciences. Like most scientists in zombie films, he can’t actually do anything about the creatures at the moment, but he develops a plan to create a vaccine—which may or may not work.

I highly recommend this film. It can be viewed on so many different levels, and it’s entertaining whichever way you watch it. I look forward to adding it to my collection and watching it again.