Little Monsters is an object lesson in how to pull off edgy comedy. Throughout this surprisingly excellent Australian zombie flick, writer-director Abe Forsythe flirts with bad taste and beyond. One joke, involving onanism and a photograph, is at once of the can’t believe they went there and has to be seen to be believed schools. Yet there’s a sweetness here that tempers the outrageousness. At heart, Little Monsters has a lot of heart.
It also gets a pass on account of being very, very funny. Don’t be fooled by the presence of more zombies than you can shake a George A. Romero box set at. A comedy-horror this may be, but — a couple of mildly tense escapes aside — the emphasis here is firmly on the former. Perhaps that’s a natural by-product of focusing the action around a group of loveable, and not killable, kids. In doing so, Forsythe almost has no choice but to ease off on the scares, with his classically slow zombies (the fast-moving breed would make this a very short film) figures of fun rather than fright.
Nyong'o imbues a relatively thin role > with plenty of charm.
And it allows him to focus on his ragtag group of characters. Nyong’o, a world away from her last outing in Us, is Miss Caroline, the good-natured schoolteacher who absolutely, positively will not let anything threaten her young charges. Despite the star billing, though, this isn’t her film. She doesn’t show up until roughly a third of the way in, and when she does, it’s as nothing more than an object of desire for Alexander England’s bedraggled if charming loser, Dave. It’s to Nyong’o’s credit that she seizes this relatively thin role and imbues it with plenty of charm and even a hint of depth.
Instead, the focus here is on Dave, a shambling, shuffling manchild who, in a microcosm of the film’s wrestling match with the boundaries of taste, is fighting a losing battle with his worst impulses. A deeply un-self-aware musician who thinks it acceptable to take his young nephew along to confront his ex-girlfriend, or play a death metal ditty to a bus of schoolkids, it’s a bold choice of lead for a movie like this. Thankfully, England — who you may remember being offed by a xenomorph in Alien: Covenant — has a nice line in sleazy charm, particularly as Dave, inspired by Miss Caroline (and not just his desire to get into her pants) and his young nephew, tries to become a better man.
There are missteps. While Josh Gad gets a fair amount of laughs gadding about as foul-mouthed, drunken kids’ entertainer Teddy McGiggle, it’s a one-note character, and nothing we haven’t seen before. And the almost complete lack of stakes means that when the gags don’t land, there’s a fair amount of dead air. By and large, though, it’s an unexpected gem.
