Little Monsters review – scatterbrained zom-com is surprisingly heartfelt

Watching low-budget Australian-British-American zombie comedy Little Monsters, you’re almost guaranteed to spend at least some time wondering how the heck Lupita Nyong’o ended up starring in it. Jordan Peele might have nabbed the Oscar-winner for his bloody home invasion thriller Us, but director Abe Forsythe doesn’t exactly possess Peele’s filmmaking clout. Luckily this zom-com (with lots of kids) is far from a blood stain on Nyong’o’s resume. For the most part, it’s an entertaining way to spend 90 minutes, even if it ultimately tries doing way too much – music! satire! – and ends up half-decapitating itself in the process.

Edgar Wright’s now-classic Shaun of the Dead provides the obvious template for this similar tale of a ginger-haired sad sack facing a zombie apocalypse in the aftermath of a breakup. Alexander England plays Dave, a 35-year-old man-child who’s moved in with sister, Tess, and nephew, Felix, after a painful split. It’s on the school run that Dave bumps into the luminous, kind-hearted Miss Caroline (Nyong’o) and – instantly enamoured – volunteers to chaperone an upcoming school trip to a petting zoo. Later these two (and an entire class of kindergarteners) find themselves holed up in the souvenir shop – this film’s own Winchester pub – as zombies pour in from the US military base next door. The undead aren’t their only problem: Frozen‘s Josh Gad provides some human conflict in a jarring performance as a famous kids’ entertainer who – guess what? – hates kids.

Comedy-wise, Little Monsters is all over the place. The jokes come thick and fast with a hit rate of about fifty percent (still higher than most studio comedies, mind you), whilst the film – despite foul language and some graphic gore – is unashamedly broad in places (Americans are stupid and don’t kids say the darndest things?). It’s a bit unexpected, then, that Little Monsters thrives not as a horror (the elements of which often seem at odds with the cute kiddy sitcom sensibility at play here) or even as a comedy, but as wholesome tale of uncle/nephew bonding. Credit to Diesel La Torraca as Felix, who passes the Annoying Kid Test with flying colours.

Nyong’o is – as always – a magnetic presence. Enlisted here to play sweet and resilient, she’s particularly good when entertaining her class with Taylor Swift songs on a ukulele (not as bad as it sounds). Later, as she dispatches hordes of the undead with a shovel, it’s akin to watching Miss Honey from Matilda as an unstoppable zombie killer. Wearing a blood-splattered yellow dress that already feels iconic, she’s destined to become a hero to hard-working teachers everywhere.

Still, if zombie movies work best when they’re holding a mirror up to society at large, the walking dead here unfortunately serve as little more than a plot device. Even when an interesting potential weakness is exposed and Little Monsters seems to be making some larger comment about the power of music, the film mows down any notion in a barrage of gunfire. It’s a good metaphor for the film on the whole: fun in the moment, but fundamentally scatterbrained.

★★★☆☆

By: Tom Barnard

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This film was screened to the press as part of the BFI London Film Festival 2019. For more information and showtimes for this year’s festival, head to our dedicated page.