After her best friend Izzy’s death, Anna focuses all her attention on Booger, the stray cat she and Izzy took in. When Booger bites her, she begins to undergo a strange transformation.
The thrills of inventive body horror entail such captivatingly disgusting emotions people have over their bodies. Crevices opening in unexpected places, extra limbs growing out of nowhere, bodies and machines melding with ruptured folds of slime. It’s all a melting pot (pun intended) of horrific landscapes for filmmakers brave enough to venture. “Booger” is like if someone watched their cat lick their asshole and wonder how terrifying it would be as a human to do that. “Booger” frames its transformation around the profound grief of losing a friend while turning into a common house cat. The film blends comedy, horror, and tragedy together in a meandering tale centered more on the disgusting transformation than on developing its story.
Grace Glowicki plays Anna, one half of a roommate duo, who loses her other half after a tragic biking accident and fixates on their escaped cat Booger. As Grace watches video after video of her roommate Izzy, the bite Booger gives her turns ominous. She starts licking her hair, coughing up furballs, and even downing cans of cat food with such ferocity she promptly throws it all up. The entire time she’s changing, all the loved ones around her converse with her and try to get her to open up about Izzy’s death, only for Anna to bluntly reject them. Anna’s relationship starts slipping. She stops going to work. Her power goes out. It won’t be long before she won’t need any of these modern conveniences – just a laser dot on the ground.
Glowicki plays Anna with a guarded sensibility. Here’s a woman with everyone grieving around her, and her grieving rituals are intensely private. She’s forced to carry everyone else’s emotions for them. Her straight-faced persona helps anchor the scenes’ sillier moments, but where she really shines is in the gross-out moments of the film. While I know that actors eat fake props that taste sweet, no rationalizing could stop me from dry-heaving as she absolutely CRUSHED a can of wet cat food pate. I had to look away to stop myself from feeling nauseous.
Everyone around Glowicki charms. Our protagonist has the hard job of carrying the film with a numb performance, given leaden lines to deliver totally out of body in her grief. It stretches the long moments of confusion in the movie a bit too long and gently points holes in the story’s runtime, exposing a threadbare budget to begin with. She shines in later portions with more cast around her to carry the momentum, but the film’s first two-thirds spends a significant portion of its time with Anna alone, sucking on her own hair.
The New York setting feels a part of the film’s backdrop. More importantly, the film uses sound to really amplify its stakes. The score to the movie stands head and shoulders above plenty of other films, and the foley work adds squishes, squelches, and squirms to scenes that could have fallen flat. It’s this kind of multi-lateral filmmaking that can really elevate a horror movie like this. A deft direction hides its shortcomings and highlights its strengths. Unfortunately, the film centers on its body horror just a little too much, only to have to cover the rest of the story in the final third.
It’s a fun tale. The story feels emotionally specific, and catharsis is to be found by the end. Still, the film dwells on its shock and awe, perhaps a little too much when it has such great directing and acting to guide it. At a brisk seventy-eight minutes, it did feel a bit longer, but that never stops it from trying to gross its audience out, mostly successfully. Shockingly, a house cat is terrifyingly gross.
In Theaters and On Video-On-Demand Friday, September 13th
