Director: Mary Dauterman
Cast: Grace Glowicki, Garrick Bernard, Heather Matarazzo, Marcia DeBonis
Screenplay: Mary Dauterman
78 mins. Not Rated.

To paraphrase Renee Zellweger, “you had me at Cat Body Horror.”

Following the death of her best friend, Anna’s focus shifts to Booger, the stray cat they had taken in together. When Booger bites her and escapes, she goes out to look for the feline, and she also begins a shocking physical transformation.

I don’t know writer/director Mary Dauterman (Wakey Wakey), I’m not sure if she has pets or not, but I can tell you from feeling, Booger feels like a Cat Body Horror film made by a filmmaker who doesn’t have a cat. There’s a shockingly low amount of actual Cat Body Horror, and it feels limited to just the grossest elements. So she has a lot of hairballs? So she can see a little in the dark? So she cleans herself? Okay, but there’s so much more on the table here, and none of it really feels like it’s playing into the themes of loss that Dauterman’s film is trying to be.

The acting here is passable, though it’s hard to know if there’s much more because, again, these actors just aren’t given much range for their characters. The best parts were the relationship between Anna (Grace Glowicki, Strawberry Mansion) and Izzy, but these are mostly seen through phone video footage and are few and far between. I just didn’t find Anna to be a very interesting or dynamic character.

One area that Booger does quite well is the depiction of grief, which was not unique (and I’m not talking about the Cat stuff here). The way she interacts with boyfriend Max (Garrick Bernard, Halfway) about how her grief is stronger because she knew Izzy better was pretty interesting. I liked that she experiences this need to make the grief about her and ignore his, though I will say that would’ve been stronger if we as an audience spent more time with Izzy before her death so that we could properly understand the relationship between Max and her. As it stands, we don’t know who is in the wrong here. I should also mention that the film’s cinematography was occasionally great, including some great dream visuals of Anna surrounded by the shadowy visage of Booger or when she’s seemingly shrunk down on this wide landscape of black fur.

Booger is a very mixed-bag movie. There are some things I liked about it, but it had a whole lot of missed opportunities as well. As a feature debut for Dauterman, there’s some promise here, and I’ve heard some great things about her short films, so this didn’t turn me away, but this Cat Body Horror is missing some necessary bite.

2.5/5
-Kyle A. Goethe