Cooties is a 2014 zombie comedy directed by Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion, written by Leigh Whannell and Ian Brennan, and starring Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson, Alison Pill, Jack McBrayer, Nasim Pedrad, Jorge Garcia and Whannell himself. It runs 88 minutes and concerns a virus in school cafeteria food that turns primary school children into zombies, leaving a group of mismatched teachers to survive the day.

I want to open with a theory, and I want to put it forward carefully, because there is a genuine chance I am simply wrong about this. I think a considerable number of people are so fond of Rainn Wilson that they have not entirely registered that he is not very good in this film.

In my opinion, this was not a good comedy, and I did not enjoy it much at all. The moments that have clearly been constructed as the big laughs did not land for me, at all. And I want to be clear that I understand what they were aiming at. I can see the shape of the film they wanted to make, which is a nasty, silly, mean-spirited little comedy about teachers surviving their own students. It simply never gets there.

In the interest of fairness, I went and read what everybody else made of Wilson, and I have to report that I am comfortably outnumbered. The single most repeated observation across reviews of this film is that he is the best thing in it, with his psychopathic gym teacher consistently named as the highlight.

I did, however, find one reviewer quietly on my side, who wrote that the role would have been perfect for either Will Ferrell or Brad Garrett. That is a diplomatic way of stating that the person in the part was not the right person for the part, and I am glad somebody else got there first.

There is also one significant hole in my own theory which I will point out before anybody else does. Cooties premiered at Sundance in January 2014, and the American version of The Office had only finished the previous year. So at the time of release, this was not nostalgia casting. He was fresh from the biggest role of his career. The nostalgia reading I am applying only really works for somebody watching it today, over a decade later, which is exactly what I am doing.

A fair amount of the rest of the cast did not work for me either, and I genuinely could not point to a highlight anywhere in the film. Though once again, this may well be a me problem rather than a them problem.

What I did enjoy, and I want to credit properly, were some of the practical effects. They got real reactions out of me. Not a great number of them, but some. And it turns out that is by design rather than by accident, because the infected children were created entirely using prosthetic makeup and blood squibs, with no computer effects involved at all. The whole thing was shot in roughly twenty-five days at a real primary school in Los Angeles, which is a genuinely impressive turnaround for a film carrying this much makeup work.