Cooties is Children of the Corn by way of Daddy Day Care. A tactless, haphazardly unfunny, totally DOA clunker, horror-comedy Cooties is the brainchild of “that guy” Leigh Whannell (of the Insidious and Saw franchises) and a severely handicapped brainchild it is.

While Cooties has Whannell flexing an altogether different muscle group than those employed in the hooey-balooey ghost zone of Insidious or the rotten torture traps of Saw, this latest, and substantively different, creative expedition has nonetheless plowed naught but barren grounds.Cootie’s one-note premise: a food-borne virus that only targets the pre-pubescent is ravaging the schoolyard and turning the students into pint-sized, teacher-killing brutes. Caught in the midst of the mayhem is wannabe writer Clint (Elijah Wood) who’s just today moved back to his hometown of Fort Chicken (Yes, the town is called Fort Chicken. No, it’s not funny. Yes, the film is packed with an armada of “cock” jokes to compliment this ludicrously stupid town name.) The first 15 minutes or so charter us down an odd path, and one that’s potential promising, but just as quickly as we’re willing to give it a chance, it squanders our goodwill and has us turning up our noses.

Cutesy, obnoxious and altogether unlikeable, Cooties tries so hard and think itself so self-aware that it’s grating almost immediately. Lame-brained jokes square off against banal characters as Cooties employs archetypes that just aren’t funny, clever or needed in a 2015 film.

Joining the fight against the brigade of possessed brats is a practically incompetent gym teacher (a Rainn Wilson saddled with some of the flick’s dumbest jokes as well as its best one-liner), a nutty science teacher (Whannell), a hey-look-he’s-a-gay-and-it’s-funny! (Jack McBrayer demeaning his child-like celebrity persona), a shroom-obsessed crossing guard (LOST‘s Jorge Garcia in a role that’s totally out to sea) and a boring but nominally appealing young educator (Alison Pill) who becomes the fulcrum point of an intimacy tug-of-war.

The film is a combination of bad jokes told often and hammy effects that blend to produce a potpourri of bad taste. Worse yet, it’s boring. Uniting cast this full of comic gems makes this worth a watch on paper but the product is almost tragically bad. Somewhere within this germ of an idea and with this same cast, there is a good movie. It’s just definitely not this one.

CONCLUSION: With no sense of purpose, reliance on thin scatological humor and an abundant lack of screenwriting prowess, ‘Cooties’ turns a great cast of underdogs into lame, annoying cardboard cutouts. It isn’t funny, it isn’t scary and it certainly isn’t good.