"If I had a box of bad things, I'd put you in it and close the lid."

Having a Hell of a week, mortals. Louisville Zombie Walk, where I will unleash around 45,000 undead onto Bardstown Road is Saturday. I will see you in front of Mid-City Mall around 8:30 p.m. Come be creepy and dead while you listen to live music and have a few drinks with dead friends. Bring the kids if you like. It's a good time.

While I was in the middle of getting that together, who should drop by, but my old buddy Plague?

Don't get me wrong. I love Plague. He means well, but there's a limit, you know. He gets to going on about how diseases can mutate until human science has no idea what to do about it, and it's hilarious for the first five minutes, but after that you're like, "I get it, man. Can you please take your hemorrhaging lesions elsewhere? You're getting pus all over everything."

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Girl With All the Gifts.

This 2016 Colm McCarthy film is built on a premise that there's a fungus that causes the zombie disease and it hast spread all over the world. There are first generation zombies, the mindless, flesh-craving automatons we all know and love, but there are a second generation, who have minds of their own and do well in school, but wear red sweatsuits and have to be strapped down when they go to class because they still have the hunger.

Now I'm going to go ahead and cut you hair-splitters off at the pass. You're going to say, "they can run and use weapons, they're not zombies. They have rage, like in 28 Days Later. This is my point about mutation. Monsters, diseases -- they mutate, okay. This is an obvious mutation on zombieism. Shut up. You're boring. Listen a minute.

First off, smart kid zombies are super creepy.

Secondly, Dr. Glenn Close, looking more like erstwhile co-star Michael Douglas than ever, hopes to use these children to extract a vaccine against zombiesm. She likes to keep them sharp by bothering them with Schrodinger's Cat puzzles right before they go to bed.

Sennie Nanua shines in her role as Melanie, the title character who tries to help guide her humans to safety after zombies crashed the gates of their home research compound. She's a thoughtful and lovable young girl, and yet also a cannibal monster.  There's a great scene when she fights off a bunch of other zombie children who aren't as bright. It's a real tearjerker.

I can't really tell you what happens beyond that. Partly because I don't want to spoil it, but mostly because Plague started coughing and sneezing and diarrheaing all over the throne room and it was very distracting. I'm going to give it another spin, though, as soon as I have a quiet minute.

The Girl With All The Gifts streams on Amazon Prime.