Little Monsters (2019) ***
There are too many fucking streaming platforms. From one point of view, of course, that’s just a new permutation of a very old problem. There’s been too much of everything for any one person to keep up with for so long that German sociologist Georg Simmel was already talking about a “crisis of culture” way back in 1903. Still, there is something novel about having too many streamers specifically, arising from the industry’s unusual combination of exclusivity and ephemerality. Every streamer wants something on the platform that’s theirs and theirs alone— otherwise what’s the point of giving your subscription money to them over one of their competitors? They’re well positioned to maintain that exclusivity, too, because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (together with the various copycat laws that have proliferated outside the United States since the early aughts) gives online media distributors an arsenal of anti-piracy weapons that premium cable channels and VHS publishers could only have dreamed about back in the 1980’s. It’s both technically more difficult and legally more hazardous to make and to circulate MPEGs of “Stranger Things” than it ever was to tape the latest episode of “Bizarre” for your friends who didn’t have Showtime. Meanwhile, the streamers for the most part operate with a Silicon Valley mentality rather than a Hollywood mentality. Their business model explicitly rejects the selling of objects that have mass and take up space, and they tend to see licensed physical-media releases of their original productions as poaching from the potential future subscriber base rather than making customers out of people who were never going to subscribe anyway. Furthermore, with the exceptions of Disney and, to a lesser extent, Paramount, streamers don’t regard their catalogs as collections of unique assets to be promoted deliberately and strategically to people making conscious decisions about what they want to watch. Netflix and the rest treat even their most closely guarded holdings as essentially fungible “content” to be served up algorithmically to largely passive consumers. The upshot is that the odds are against you ever learning that any given direct-to-streaming film or TV show even exists, unless it’s hosted on a platform to which you already subscribe. And if you did learn that it existed, it would have to be something damned impressive to make you take on another monthly subscription just to see it— especially given the well-known tendency of streaming titles to disappear with little warning, either to free up server space for the next interchangeable bucket of video hog-slop, or because of the vagaries of the licensing deal between the streamer and the production company. It’s a paradigm combining the worst aspects of early-80’s HBO, mid-90’s Academy Home Entertainment, and the eraser-happy BBC of the 1970’s, and it guarantees that some amount of worthy and well-made work is going to be lost, forgotten, or never noticed in the first place alongside all the cheap dross.
Case in point: Little Monsters. This dark Australian comedy pits a kindergarten teacher played by Lupita Nyong’o against a horde of flesh-eating zombies that descend upon the low-budget amusement park where she has taken her class for a field trip. One of my favorite subgenres, one of my favorite actresses currently active in the business, and a hook that threatens kindergarteners with cannibalism?! Surely I’d have pounced on this thing the moment it went before the public, right? Yeah, well, in this country, Little Monsters got picked up for direct-to-streaming release by Hulu. I don’t subscribe to Hulu, and I already have enough household overhead, thank you very much. No Little Monsters for me, then. Indeed, I completely forgot about this movie over the ensuing six years, and I probably would never have thought about it again had New Year’s Eve not found me at my mother-in-law’s house, with access to my sister-in-law’s Hulu account. Juniper, Inanna bless her, did remember Little Monsters, and suggested it as a way to eat up a couple of the hours before midnight. Thus did I finally see this film after all, and you know what? It’s good. It’s exactly the kind of flick that I’d have been delighted to bring home from Blockbuster or Hollywood Video or Potomac Video back in the day, but am I going to subscribe to Hulu now because of it? You’re goddamned right, I’m not.
It’s going to be a while before zombies, endangered children, or even Lupita Nyong’o show up, however. Instead, we’re introduced initially to dipshit manchild Dave Anderson (Alexander England, from Gods of Egypt and Alien: Covenant) and his eternally exasperated girlfriend, Sara (Nadia Townsend, of Knowing and Puppy). These two do nothing whatsoever but fight— at home, on dates, when out with friends, and even at Sara’s birthday dinner with her folks. It’s the usual 21st-century romantic comedy routine, really: she’s ready to grow up and make something of herself, whereas he’s content to keep on playing video games, smoking pot, and annoying everyone in town to the threshold of violence as the world’s only black metal busker. Inevitably, the day comes when Sara has enough. She throws Dave out of the flat, at which point he moves in with his older sister, Tess (Huntsman 5.1’s Kat Stewart). Tess has her shit very much together; as both a nurse and a single mother, she doesn’t have much choice in the matter. Naturally she has almost as little tolerance for Dave’s immaturity as Sara, especially when it seems like he’s trying to impart his bad habits to her five-ish son, Felix (Diesel La Torraca). Indeed, Tess gets to the verge of giving her brother the boot, too, after he recruits Felix into a cockamamie scheme to win back his ex, which results in the kid walking in on Sara banging her stock-brokery new boyfriend (Glenn Hazeldine) in the living room of her apartment. Dave’s ass is saved only by Felix’s pleas for clemency on his behalf.
The upside of the latter incident is that it gets Dave over Sara right quick. It also makes him feel sufficiently contrite toward Tess to begin experimenting with token gestures of responsibility, like occasionally dropping Felix off at school. That in turn brings Dave into contact with the boy’s smoking-hot kindergarten teacher, Audrey Caroline (Nyong’o, from Us and The Quiet Place: Day One). His understandable mooning over Audrey inspires yet further efforts to be seen going through the motions of not being a douchebag, culminating when he volunteers to chaperone Felix’s class field trip to Pleasant Valley Park, an amusement park of the old school that’s more about playgrounds, puppet shows, and petting zoos than it is about thrill rides and “experiences.” That’s sure to impress Miss Caroline, right?
Maybe. But she, Dave, those kids, and indeed everyone at the park that day— including inexplicably popular children’s television host Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad, from Artemis Fowl and Razortooth)— will all have more pressing concerns. That’s because Pleasant Valley Park is located just up the road from an American overseas military base where scientists in the employ of the Pentagon are investigating ways of keeping Uncle Sam’s fighting men combat-ready even after they’ve been killed. Thus far, the results have been closer to Dawn of the Dead than to Shock Waves, which is a problem on two fronts. Looking at it strictly from a military perspective, these zombies are better at sowing chaos than they are at winning battles, and war involves plenty of chaos as it is. From a practical point of view, meanwhile, the individual zombies’ manifest inferiority to live humans can lead even trained soldiers and scientists to let their guard down while working with them. Somebody does just that on the day of Felix’s field trip, and a bunch of the zombies get loose. The people they kill while doing so rise from the dead in turn, and the contingency plans for dealing with such a situation don’t work fast enough to prevent the zombies from breaching the base perimeter. The next thing you know, there’s a column of the walking dead trudging toward Pleasant Valley Park. The civilians playing mini-golf, petting farm animals, and buying tacky souvenirs are naturally caught even more unawares than the personnel at the army base, which of course multiplies the ranks of the undead yet further. It doesn’t pay, though, to underestimate the courage and ingenuity of a dedicated teacher— or, for that matter, of a doofus desperate to earn his way into her heart and/or pants.
If you go into Little Monsters thinking of it as a horror comedy, it’ll seem like it’s taking a long time to get rolling, or even to tip its hand regarding what it’s rolling toward. That’s because this movie is really better understood as a romantic comedy in which the crisis that transforms its loser hero into a desirable man is a zombie uprising. The central joke is still a collision between two seemingly incompatible genres, but the object is to use a horror scenario to send up romcom tropes more than the other way around. That said, writer/director Abe Forsythe seems to have taken it as his operative theory that the best way to parody a genre is to start by making a really good example of it, so those who routinely enjoy watching an assclown better himself to win the love of a woman whom he doesn’t initially deserve ought to get even more out of Little Monsters than I did.
Now obviously my conception of a good romantic comedy is rather suspect, since I’m not a fan of the things under ordinary circumstances. But what I enjoyed about this aspect of Little Monsters was that it seemed to be going out of its way to address my turnoffs in the genre. Most importantly, Forsythe acknowledges Dave’s essential childishness, and acknowledges it further as a completely legitimate reason for fully functioning adults to have little patience with him. Sara isn’t made to seem like a party-pooper for wanting to move forward in life, nor is Tess made to seem like a castrating bitch for expecting her brother to shoulder some responsibility so long as he’s sharing her home. Indeed, the one person who does instantly take a liking to Dave is Felix, whose child’s-eye view of the world he ratifies. Note, however, that the capacity to see things from a kid’s point of view isn’t portrayed as inherently negative, either. After all, that’s part of what makes Audrey such a good teacher, beloved by all her students. The difference is that she can turn it off, and that she has the perspicacity to know when to do so, whereas Dave has to live through a zombie siege in order to learn those lessons. And that’s the other half of Little Monsters’ success in romcom mode— that Audrey is obviously compatible with Dave at heart, rather than beginning the film as a stick-in-the-mud who needs a dope mired in suspended adolescence to loosen her up. She embodies from the start what Dave needs to become, and what she needs in turn is not someone to change her or to fill in her missing pieces, but merely a partner capable of operating on her quirky wavelength. Dave can do that, and it becomes a literally lifesaving asset to the both of them once he learns to harness his juvenility instead of being limited by it.
Little Monsters is also a horror comedy, though, and while it isn’t as impressively original in that mode, it’s certainly effective enough. If nothing else, Forsythe knows his Romero. The military forces that come belatedly to the “rescue” at Pleasant Valley Park are like a Keystone Kops version of The Crazies, while Teddy McGiggle is an absurdist composite of every small-minded, self-serving, chickenshit bastard who ever kneecapped an effort to survive against the zombies for which the latter director is most famous. Forsythe, with the invaluable help of Josh Gad, pulls off some interesting tricks with McGiggle as well. The character enters the film as an insufferably twee burlesque of everything adults can’t stand in children’s entertainment, evolves into a genuine danger as the man behind the persona starts coming into view, and is ultimately reduced to a pathetic grotesque who could still get you killed if you make the mistake of trusting him. He gets a terrific comeuppance, too— something right out of an EC horror comic. McGiggle even figures in the film’s most purely transgressive moments, whenever circumstances let him give vent to his normally well-concealed loathing for children. Not all the kids at the park have a Miss Caroline to look out for them when the undead horde arrives, so a fair number of them end up joining it before all is said and done. McGiggle takes visible pleasure in destroying the pint-sized walking dead, which makes for a much queasier spectacle than I imagined Little Monsters was going to have in it. On the one hand, it’s like watching Mr. Rogers go full Freddy Krueger. But on the other, how can one rationally object to knocking a zombie’s block off, even if it used to be a nine-year-old girl?
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