Writer/director Abe Forsythe whips up a relatively plain zombie takeover, which is a big tell on the movie’s limited creativity. Yes, there's snarling, flesh-decaying post-humans who saunter around, and sometimes make for gnarly disembowelments straight out of “The Walking Dead.” But there's little inspiration behind the zombies themselves, who don’t create any nervous stakes (even with kids in the mix), or get decapitated in snazzy ways. Nyong’o even has a sequence where she dives into zombie battle, but the film cuts away from it, only showing her after, her dress and hair drastically restyled with blood and guts. It’s another example of “Little Monsters” skipping past even the smallest of gratuitous genre delights—how could you ramp up Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o going ballistic on the undead, and then not show us? 

The zombie apocalypse of “Little Monsters” largely takes place during the day, a key detail in how the film yearns to balance a light heart with dark comedy. But Forsythe’s script doesn’t have the cleverness to make such a tone pop, instead filling the time with easy, cringeworthy jokes, like often making Gad fall to the ground hard, or watching Dave bumble his way to accidental heroism. “Little Monsters” even has a stereotypical joke about Asian tourists taking pictures, and it would be more offensive if it didn’t seem like it was par for the film’s shallow course. I did laugh hard when a maniacal Gad aggressively cusses out the youngsters—one moment in which adult cruelty barrels through youthful innocence—but perhaps knowing how funny that beat is, and not being able to think of anything else, “Little Monsters” then repeats it over and over, the shock losing its luster.

“Little Monsters” is not for kids, and yet it wants to be as cute as their singalongs, even just by its premise alone. More than with any usual comedy, your mileage will undoubtedly vary with “Little Monsters,” especially if you find kids (with their matching frog backpacks and little observations) unflappably endearing, or man-children instantly worth rooting for. But as someone who constantly struggled to have mindless fun with “Little Monsters”—its self-amusement is far more obvious than it is infectious. 

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