Zombies hunger Down Under

When Lupita Nyong’o tells a bunch of kindergartners: “One, two, three, eyes on me,” viewers of Little Monsters jolt to attention, too. The charismatic Nyong’o is easily the best part of this feeble Australian horror comedy, arriving Friday to Hulu, as Miss Caroline, a Taylor Swift-crooning, ukulele-strumming teacher who turns fierce when her class is attacked by zombies while on a field trip to a petting farm.

Unfortunately, the film’s nominal lead is Dave (Alexander England), a rude, selfish would-be rocker whom the writer-director Abe Forsythe sets on a collision course with utterly predictable redemption. Crushing on a dedicated educator and battling ravenous corpses will do that to the most terminally irritating man-child.

When zombies — spawned by an experiment gone wrong at a nearby US military outpost — descend on the koalas and the sheep and the kids, Dave, who tagged along as a chaperon, initially sputters. Faring even worse is Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad), a superstar children’s entertainer who just happened to be shooting his show at Pleasant Valley Farm. While he reveals himself to be a foul-mouthed megajerk, he also lands the film’s single best line, so he is almost (almost) forgiven. In contrast to the hapless men, Miss Caroline never loses her cool and steadfastly dispatches the lurching attackers. By the end, she looks like Mary Poppins after a post-apocalyptic Tough Mudder race — and Nyong’o slays both registers.

To Forsythe’s credit, his movie takes place in a universe where people are at least aware of pop culture’s zombie obsession. Dave’s young nephew, Felix (Diesel La Torraca), knows how to stop them, having successfully destroyed them in video games. But Little Monsters does not move the needle for the comic-zombie genre, which has not progressed much in the 15 years since

Shaun Of The Dead and the 10 since Zombieland.