Musty TV's Maniacal Movie Countdown - Day 2: Little Monsters (2019)

When I started watching this movie I was convinced I had started to watch the wrong Little Monsters. No, it's not that I was intending to watch the 1989 Little Monsters starring Fred Savage (but perhaps I should?). I was set to watch a zombie movie starring Lupita N'Yongo as a kindergarten teacher protecting children from zombies. But the opening montage featured an Australian couple bickering with each other over increasingly stupid topics. So I double-checked to make sure I was indeed watching the 2019 movie Little Monsters and not some Australian sitcom.

And indeed I was. 

I did know going into it that it was a comedy, but I thought the whole film would center on Lupita N'Yongo's character. Instead, she shows up about 20 minutes into the movie, while the first part focuses on Dave (Alexander England), a deadbeat musician who has just broken up with his girlfriend and is living with his sister and nephew, Felix (played excellently by a kid with the best name ever: Diesel La Torraca ).

The duo eventually finds themselves on a field trip to a petting zoo with kindergarten teacher Miss Caroline (N'Yongo) and children's show host Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad). And this petting zoo is inconveniently located next to a U.S. military testing facility that has just had a breach...

I'll give the movie props for having the balls to turn kids into zombies, albeit not any kids we really care about, and also appreciate that it manages to keep the kids-in-peril-plot pretty low stress. But it doesn't do anything new with the zombie set-up, and just isn't really funny enough for me to fully recommend it. Much of the comedy relies on Josh Gad's character, and whether you enjoy that will have a lot to do with how much Josh Gad you can stand (my tolerance is pretty low). 

But I will say I really did enjoy Lupita N'Yongo's performance. She's a great combination of fierce and compassionate in the role, doing her best to protect her class and maintain calm.

Little Monsters is streaming on Hulu. 

Musty TV's Maniacal Movie Countdown - Day 1: Slaughterhouse Rock (1987)

It's been a few years since I launched this countdown with a San Francisco-set horror movie, so I thought I'd go back to that tradition for 2026. Too bad the movie I chose was Slaughterhouse Rock which just barely counts as a San Francisco movie (or, really, a movie at all).

About half of the movie is set on Alcatraz, though aside from a few establishing shots that include the San Francisco skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge, it is very clearly not actually Alcatraz. There's also not a lot of "rock" - in either sense of the term - happening in this slaughterhouse despite the story's initial set-up being the death of a heavy metal band as they were visiting Alcatraz.

Plot wise, it begins with a local college student having bad dreams related to that event, so he and seemingly everyone he knows decide the only way to stop the dreams is for all of them to venture to Alcatraz after dark together to break a curse. Or something.

It's there that they run into the only thing that makes this movie even slightly worth watching, and that's Toni Basil as a ghost who's stuck on the island, but knows how to set the other souls stuck there free. And yes, it involves a dance, a clip of which I will include below. She also has several great costume changes that are peak 80's does 1940's and 1950's retro that I'm pretty sure came out of her own closet. And she is also featured, along with Devo, on the soundtrack.

Other than that this movie manages to be a total snooze. Like, I literally fell asleep twice while watching it. You need only watch the film's opening scene, which goes on forever, to know that this is a movie that will streeetttch wherever it can to make its 90-minute running time.

Slaughterhouse Rock is streaming on several platforms. I watched it on Prime, to avoid commercials.