"He is ridiculous, truly ridiculous, but also touching. On finding Wade's heart amid all the zombie chaos
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So, no, I did not dress up as movie characters." Everyone was a ghost or a pirate or a zombie, and girls were princesses and that was it. There was not this over-the-top planning of costumes months in advance.
In the '70s, you went down to the drugstore or you cut out a sheet with holes in it or you made a pirate costume with a bandana and a leather vest. It was not this big thing where people get fancy costumes. "When I grew up in the '70s, Halloween was a very different thing. Get a visor and a hockey stick and it's an instant costume."īut he definitely didn't grow up dressing like movie characters for Halloween "All you need is a blue track suit and cowboy boots and a biker 'stache. On his Cooties character becoming an easy Halloween costume
It's not like I was being very picky and choosy, 'I think the next thing I do will be a really cutting-edge independent horror film.' I auditioned, they offered me the job, I said, 'Hell Yeah!'" When I did House of 1,000 Corpses, I had been unemployed for a year. "People always ask actors why they chose to do something, but so much of it is just getting offered the right thing at the right time. On what people get wrong about movie casting He's a great writer and actor and a director too." So that's the key, aspiring filmmakers who are also actors. He's the writer and he wrote himself all the very best lines. On Leigh Whannell's constant scene stealing And the ensemble cast, everyone is given some really funny moments. It's gruesome and freaky scary, bloodthirsty children was something I had not seen before. So that was the lens through which I saw the movie and I loved it. I had to pause, take a deep breath, and think about how that could be really cool. "The first thing that was really said to me about it that immediately piqued my interest was that it was written by the cocreator of Saw and the cocreator of Glee. We spoke to Wilson, who is truly great in the movie, earlier this week about how he got cast in this inspired, hilarious, twisted horror-comedy that isn't afraid to go some dark but funny places. The virus, which turns its host into a raging, body-munching psycho, only affects people who haven't hit puberty yet.Ĭooties stars Elijah Wood, Alison Pill, Jack McBrayer, Leigh Whannell, Nasim Pedrad, Jorge Garcia and Rainn Wilson, who plays Wade, a macho gym teacher who will do whatever it takes to survive. It's about a bunch of teachers who find themselves at ground zero of a zombie outbreak after their school unknowingly serves a virus-infected batch of chicken nuggets. And then a movie like Cooties comes along and scratches an itch you forgot you had.
With “Cooties,” what starts as recess fades all too rapidly into movie detention.The zombie apocalypse is everywhere these days, to the point where it may seem like you've seen all there is to see. But as with most of these genre-tweaking romps, the fizz dissipates and what’s left are obvious gore beats, lame jokes, uninspired plot mechanics and an inability to end the mayhem satisfactorily.
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SIGN UP for the free Indie Focus movies newsletter >įirst-time feature directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion keep a good pace and show some comic flair with performance and visuals. It’s by two writers, Leigh Whannell and Ian Brennan, who have each co-fathered pop culture spawn (“Saw” and “Glee,” respectively) occasionally deserving of their own punches to the kisser.įor a half-hour or so, “Cooties” has barbed fun with food safety (a local chicken-processing plant is responsible for the outbreak), eccentric sad-sack teachers (energetically played by Elijah Wood, Alison Pill, Rainn Wilson, writer Whannell and others) and rabid children trying to get into the school to eat their daytime tormentors. What grade-school teachers know, but may not want to express, is that as noble as the profession is, it sometimes requires squelching the desire to pop certain brats in the face.įrom that unspoken no-no comes the horror comedy “Cooties,” a semi-spirited live-action cartoon about infected zombie schoolkids.