It starts off very strong, but starts to slide at just about the time that the kids will start to goof off and ignore it. It has the makings of a great teen slumber party movie. There are definite high-points that had us laughing out loud, but the overall themes ultimately fail to gel.
It’s first drawn-out, then truncated as if the production just ran out of money (or interest). Instead of the former emerging organically from the latter, transitions seemed forced and lacking rhythm leaving the audience off-balance. The ending, especially, feels forced and loses much of the silliness and fun of the early movie. There is often tension between the humor and the horror. The characters are simple and single-dimensional and the challenges they face predictable. Unfortunately, despite the promising premise, the actual execution is more mediocre than inspired. These scenes are played with enough humor to temper the reality, yet are still more than dark enough to amuse those with more twisted senses of humor. You may feel a little guilty about giggling when a school girl is knocked on her ass by a baseball cannon, but you’ll still giggle anyway. Jack McBrayer also plays, as always, himself.Īfter our intros, a troublesome morning and a lunch laden with foreshadowing, our teachers are made witness to a recess-of-bloody-death thanks to tainted chicken nuggets that turn all the children into mindless, ravenous cannibals. He discovers that his high-school crush ( Alison Pill, who is almost completely wasted) also works as a teacher and is dating the completely cliched, overbearing gym teacher ( Rainn Wilson, playing Dwight Schrute from The Office). Our hero is, specifically, substitute elementary school teacher Clint ( Elijah Wood, playing exactly the same character he perfected in Wilfred) who’s recently been forced to move back to his small home town after failing as a writer in New York City. Here we start with something of an adversarial relationship to begin with: teachers and students. It’s manipulative to trot out the small versions of ourselves that our entire evolutionary history has convinced us not to kill (no matter how annoying they get) and create an “us or them” situation. Movies featuring homicidal children are pretty common as well (we’ve reviewed more than a few of those on our sister site, ). Zombie movies have often used infected children or infants to increase tension and create memorable moments (we’ve featured several previously as Zombies of the Week).
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