Thankfully, Little Monsters is a movie with zombies in it and those eventually make their way into the plot and improve things slightly once Dave accompanies his nephew on a Kindergarten field trip to a petting zoo overseen by Felix's dedicated teacher, Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong'o). If that seems out of character for Dave, just remember he only goes along because he's got a crush on Miss Caroline. Once they're at the petting zoo, a zombie outbreak leaves Dave, Miss Caroline, the kids and a children's television host Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad) trapped in a souvenir store. Will they able to survive the zombie onslaught? With Miss Caroline and her trusty ukulele around, anything is possible!
Little Monsters is kind of a mess of a movie, one of those features that seems to have come to life because there were ideas for certain scenes or images but not a whole cohesive feature. It's easy to see why writer/director Abe Forsythe would be enamored with the best parts of the production. A sequence of Miss Caroline running through a swarm of zombies to get some medicine for Felix, that's just all around fun and leads to a great gag where she returns to the children trying to act all calm and soothing while her yellow dress is soaked in blood. A couple of dark gags, like the camera panning over from a petting zoo to a U.S. military base right next door or a zombie's face after devouring a porcupine, are similarly memorable in both concept and execution.
As a whole feature, though, Little Monsters really can't sustain itself, mostly because its better features keep running up against its weaker elements. The jokes, for example, are at their best when it's just visual gags based on the zombies juxtaposed against a petting zoo setting. Endless attempts at wringing humor out of Josh Gad's kids TV show host just screaming profanity around kids, that, on the other hand, gets old real fast. Meanwhile, the characters are a total mixed bag, which is a problem since so much of the movie is about these people trapped in a souvenir store and talking about their problems. The character are especially troublesome when considering their overall arcs throughout the movie. Dave just changes halfway through the runtime into a more noble person and it's like Alexander England is playing a wholly different person, it doesn't feel at all consistent with what we've seen of the character up to this point. At least this abrupt about-face means we don't have to deal with grating man-child Dave any longer.
The kids themselves also prove to be pretty extraneous entities, they're mostly just MacGuffins used to move the adult characters along. This leaves any attempts in the third act to provide resolution to running gags or plotlines involving the child characters (chief among them an extended sequence involving Felix in a Darth Vader outfit) feeling half-hearted at best. In those moments, Little Monsters seems to know where to end these plotlines, but it doesn't know how to provide satisfying build-up to those conclusions. Miss Caroline is probably the most fun and well-realized character in the whole production, combining Rick Grimes and Mrs. Frizzle into one person is a wonderful mixture that Lupita Nyong'o is a delight in portraying.
But even her character isn't free from the unimaginative writing that plagues Little Monsters since she and Dave eventually spark up a forced romance that goes nowhere unexpected. Couldn't there have been a more inspired way to explore Dave's growth as a person than to just give him a woman as a prize for becoming a marginally better guy? Then again, going for creative options really isn't something Little Monsters is good at, so maybe such a lackluster conclusion to such a plotline shouldn't be a shocker. While I know the lack of new feature-length horror movie options in October 2019 is discouraging, you can still find plenty of better horror/comedy offerings for this Halloween than Little Monsters.
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