Man-child Dave - crashing at his older sister's house after harrowing fights with his girlfriend result in their break-up - volunteers to chaperone nephew Felix's field trip to Pleasant Valley Farm. Dave has a crush on Felix's kindergarten teacher, Audrey Caroline (Lupita Nyong'o). Everyone should have a crush on Miss Caroline: she is bright, cheerful, clever, compassionate and full of songs. Her kids love her. And when the field trip rapidly devolves into a localized zombie apocalypse (the farm is located right next to a U.S. Army testing facility and their "Project Regeneration" goes horribly and predictably wrong), Miss Caroline is also ferociously protective of her young charges, not only trying to keep them alive but also shield them from being emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives.
The situation is complicated by Josh Gad's character, "Teddy McGiggles," a children's television show host. His character is completely reprehensible. Two minutes after his introduction, I wrote in my notes that he was so awful that I guessed he would die saving a child and redeem himself. SPOILER The movie goes the other way: Teddy McGiggles dies as horribly as he behaved. I was okay with that.
The zombie makeup is good; there's a shot of a zombie with a faceful of quills after eating the petting zoo's captive echidna that made me laugh out loud. But the comedy is a little pale and the horror is too. Little Monsters is good enough for the casual zom-com fan but by far fails to reach the heights of benchmark Shaun of the Dead.
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