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Outcast (2015)

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onehalfstar

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This is not the first time I’ve been burned this exact way before, but there’s an incredibly cruel lie in Nic Cage’s top billing in the period action cheapie Outcast. If anything, Cage’s role in the film is as a glorified cameo, mostly leaving Hayden Christensen & a cast of unknowns to their own lackluster devices. There’s some vague traces of entertainment value to be found in seeing a once-a-moody-teen Anakin Skywalker all grown up, high on opium, and getting pissed on, but by the time Nic Cage returns late in the film, ravenous for scenery to chew, it feels like a huge cheat. At one point a character admonishes Adult Anakin’s opium addiction by reminding him that the drug “dulls a man’s senses.” He responds that, “Some things are better dulled.” This is advice Outcast takes way too close to its exceedingly dull heart, over-stuffing the screen with long traveling sequences and underwhelming martial arts when all I really wanted as an audience was Nic Cage sporting a terrible wig & accent. Normally it’d be unfair to punish a movie for not being what you expected, but when you promise Nic Cage antics as your main attraction, you best deliver.

Here’s what we are afforded, Cage wise: early in the film he appears sword-fighting in knight’s armor; he then disappears for an entire hour, returning only for a few, sparse, bizarrely hilarious speeches that make you wish his character (“The White Ghost”) were the focus of the film, as promised. Seeing an armored Cage wield a sword definitely has a novelty to it, as I don’t think it’s something I’ve ever encountered before, but the moment is fleeting. When he returns to sweat & curse & act like a martial arts pirate it’s a godsend. He describes things as being “thick as flies on a farting goat’s ass”, tells crazy stories about his human prop wife, and makes direct references to his distractingly artificial hair. If we had a whole film of this stuff, it might’ve actually been worth the time & money. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

Unlike actually-enjoyable films like Vampire’s Kiss & The Wicker Man, which are done a disservice by being reduced to memes, Outcast might be best viewed as a YouTube highlight reel. Endless traveling montages & a piss-soaked, opium addicted, too-adult Anakin Skywalker are all well & good in their own place & time, but it’s just unfair to deliver such trivialities when there’s a foul-mouthed pirate Nic Cage just begging for more screen time. Stylistically, the film doesn’t have much going for it either, recalling a decade-late Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon knockoff with enough superfluous Dutch angles to give Battlefield Earth a run for its money. That could be a forgivable offense, though, if they had just delivered what they promised.

Side note: The score’s main theme sounds hilariously similar to Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart”. Either that or I was just desperately looking for ways to occupy my mind.

-Brandon Ledet

Bulletproof Monk (2003)

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threehalfstar

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There’s a delicate balance at work in Bulletproof Monk (which easily could also have been titled Tibetan Punk! or Monks & Punks) that a lot of lesser films fail to achieve. Judging solely by the basic monks & punks premise and the cheesy early 00s imagery, it’s by all means a bad movie. At the same time, however, it resists nearly all negative criticism by being such a delightfully goofy bad movie that’s very much self-aware in its vapid silliness. In a lot of ways the film sells itself as a action-comedy cash-in on the cultural & financial success of martial arts choreography-fests The Matrix & Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it also has its own charms as a unique intellectual property, which are mostly dependent on the natural charisma of its costars Yun-Fat Chow (as the monk) and Seann William Scott (as the punk, naturally).

The story begins in a Tibetan monastery where an elderly monk plays right into the classic one-day-from-retirement trope and is brutally murdered in a hailstorm of bullets. What kind of a bastard would murder a kind, old monk, you ask? Why, a Nazi bastard, of course. In addition to the film’s already preposterous buddy dynamic of a Tibetan punk and a New York City punk, Bulletproof Monk also makes room for aging, power-hungry Nazis, a shirtless British rapper named Mr. Funktastic, and the red-hot daughter of a Russian crime lord. It’s a quite silly hodgepodge of mismatched characters, but they have more in common than you’d expect. For instance, both aging Nazis & shirtless British rappers enjoy hanging out in underground smokeshow lairs that split the aesthetic difference between steampunk & Hot Topic. Also, New York City pickpockets who inexplicable live in millionaires’ apartments above adorable single screen cinemas and pious Tibetan monks both share a deep passion for Crouching Tiger-type martial arts & Matrix-era bullet time, which the former learned from the movie theater and the latter from his lifetime dedication to protecting an ancient scroll that’s incredibly important for some reason or another.

The critical consensus at the time of Bulletproof Monk’s release was that it was a disappointing comedy saved from being a total wash solely by the virtues of Chow Yun-Fat’s martial arts skills. I’m not sure if its campy charms have just improved with time or if I’m just more able than most to excuse a movie’s faults sheerly for the purity of its goofy attitude, but it’s hard for me to fault a movie that features Chow Yun-Fat performing gymnastics on a mid-flight helicopter’s landing gear or the line “Lucky for you this crumpet’s come begging for some of my funktastic love.” Seann William Scott is also surprisingly convincing as a no-good punk with a heart of gold and there are some genuinely striking images of him learning/practicing kung fu in front of a movie screen. Bulletproof Monk may have been a disappointing development for Chow Yun-Fat’s fans after the heights of his John Woo collaborations & career-defining performance in the Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, but for a fan of goofy buddy comedies, bizarre cultural relics, and Nazi war criminals getting their due, it’s quite a treat & surprisingly just as impervious to criticism as it is to bullets.

-Brandon Ledet

Unfriended (2015)

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fourstar

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Sometimes the most effective horror films are the ones that can find terror in the mundane. It’s all well & good to be terrified of humanoid freakshows like Michael Myers & Jason Voorhees, but there’s a degree of separation with monsters like that. You can imagine them stalking you in the dark, but they’re not a part of your everyday life. It’s the films that turn the familiar into threats that can cut a little closer to home. Jaws scares us about what’s lurking in water. It Follows scares us about the vulnerability of sexual encounters. Alien scares us about venturing into outer space. You know, everyday stuff. Of course, attempting to milk the mundane for scares can end up making a film out to be a punchline, like in the case of The Lift (an 80s cheapie about a haunted elevator) or in Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. It’s a fine line to draw, but if a movie can turn something ordinary into something sinister it’s a lot more likely to stick with viewers once they leave the theater.

Surprisingly, the laptop-framed live chat horror flick Unfriended has it both ways. It’s so ludicrously invested in its gimmickry that it comes off as kind of a joke, but the commitment also leads to genuinely chilling moments that remind the audience a little too much of their own digital experiences. As a dumb horror flick filmed entirely from the first-person POV of gossipy teen operating a laptop, it’s both way more fun & way more affecting than it has any right to be. Unfriended uses real-life programs like Facebook, Chat Roulette, and Skype to lure audiences into the sense of a familiar online experience, but what’s incredible is how it turns those brands into something sinister. Its greatest trick is how it finds terror & suspense in a lagging video stream or a program that stubbornly acts on its own. The frustration & helplessness of those situations are common to a lot of digital experiences, but they generally aren’t caused by a murderous, revenge-bent ghost. Much like with other intangible spaces like television static & the isolation of outer space, there feels like there’s a legitimate possibility of a ghost chilling there. If a ghost were to exist somewhere, a haunted Facebook account or Skype session seems to be as hospitable of a place as any.

Of course, as its ridiculous trailer indicates, Unfriended is just as faithful to horror genre clichés as it is to its real-time laptop viewpoint gimmick. Just like every sound & image on display is a direct result of the laptop’s user (or the ghost that haunts them), every character’s wretched personality & grisly death feels preordained by horror movie rules, as if the know-it-all dicks from Scream were calling the shots. The teens in Unfriended are cruel, air-headed twits that deserve what’s coming to them: contrived deaths-by-appliances that range from being as goofy as the rogue soda machine in Maximum Overdrive to some truly grotesque demises. It takes an already-won-over fan of the slasher genre to enjoy the space Unfriended occupies between legitimately freaky and violently goofy. It’s not going to win over casual passersby with insightful musings on teen bullying & the vulnerability of our online presence the way titles like It Follows & The Babadook attracted larger audiences with their respective explorations of teen sexuality & mental health. It’s not nearly as intelligent or tasteful as either of those films. Instead, it pushes a gimmick that could easily outwear its welcome into some really creepy territory, while keeping in mind that its limitations require it to be cheap thrills entertainment above all else. Despite my moderate-at-best expectations going in, I found this balance to be surprisingly rewarding and encourage fans of the genre to give it a shot, regardless of how they felt about the laughable ads.

-Brandon Ledet

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2015)

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twohalfstar

The ads for the recent horror comedy Wyrmood: Road of the Dead had me expecting a low budget, “sweded” version of Mad Max: Road Warrior, not necessarily because it was filmed in Australia or included the word “Road” in its title, but because of the film’s costume design. The characters were shown suited up in makeshift armor composed of protective sporting gear like hockey masks & football pads, as if they were preparing to play some kind of Mad Max-themed organized sport. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what’s going on here. Instead, Wyrmood apes a completely different genre franchise: Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy. Had I better prepared myself for the film’s zany zombie comedy tone, I may enjoyed it slightly more than I did, but there’d still be the underlying problem that at this point in time, the world isn’t in any particular need of another straightforward zombie exercise, goofy or not. There are surely still die-hard fans of the genre that will enjoy Wyrmwood for its undead antics, but for everyone else the film has a lot of potential to feel almost entirely pointless.

That’s not to say there aren’t some original concepts in Wyrmwood’s zombie-infested world. There are some entertainingly outlandish ideas about using zombies as an alternative fuel source, a still-alive human who can control the zombies through a telepathic mental connection, and how a person’s blood type can affect their chances of infection, but a few fresh details aren’t really enough to distinguish the film from the run-of-the mill titles of its genre. This more-of-the-same vibe is most apparent during flashbacks to the initial outbreak, a story we’ve all seen told many, many times before. The best chances the film has of standing out on its own as a unique property are in its goofball humor or its incredible costume design, but as mentioned before, even those elements feel familiar to the work of Army of Darkness’ Sam Raimi or Mad Max’s George Miller. The most unique element in the entirety of the film, then, is a mad scientist who schedules disco breaks in his back-of-a-truck laboratory (when he’s not torturing both the alive & the undead), but his presence isn’t of enough consequence to make too big of an impact.

I’m willing to chalk up my disappointment with Wyrmwood as a personal problem and the film’s. I’m sure there are plenty of people for whom another straightforward zombie comedy sounds like a fun-enough endeavor (even with its preference for CGI blood splatter over practical effects). I’ve even enjoyed a few recent ones myself, like the zom-com titles Warm Bodies & Life After Beth, but I felt like those brought a lot more fresh ideas to the table. Wyrmwood is more concerned with having fun than having something interesting to say, which is a generally admirable approach to any genre, but just doesn’t add up to enough here. It would take someone with a certain level of reverence for the inherent charms of the zombie genre to not mind watching more of the same at this point, goofy antics or not. I just didn’t have it in me.

-Brandon Ledet

Invisible Invaders (1959)

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three star

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Although it’s a lot more small-scale charming than hilariously inept, the black & white cheapie Invisible Invaders shares a lot with the alien takeover by way of zombie mind control plot of Ed Wood’s trashterpiece Plan 9 From Outer Space, right down to the over-reliance on stock footage and the 1959 release date. An essential difference between the two pictures, however, can be detected in the “Invisible” half of Invisible Invaders’ title. In Ed Wood’s Plan 9, the Earth invaders are sassy, overdressed fops who re-animate lifeless corpses as a Plan B (or “Plan I” really, seeing how far they got down their list of options). In Invisible Invaders, the plot to “inhabit the bodies of dead Earth men” is not only the initial plan, but also a necessary one, as the aliens who invade our planet are invisible alien spirits without physical bodies to call their own (which isn’t too far from the “Thetans” of Scientology).

You see, the titular Invisible Invaders have been around for a long time. A really long time. According to their initial contact in the film they, in fact, conquered & eliminated all life on the Earth’s moon more than 20,000 years ago, converting the natural satellite into their own impregnable space base and have been just kinda . . . chilling there ever since. Makes total sense, but what would prompt these superior, unseeable beings to finally snap out of their moon haze and set their eyes on the main planet? Because the film was produced during the cold war, the answer is, of course, that our rapid development of space travel & atomic weapons alarmed them to the point where they had no choice to intervene.  Their mode of intervention just happened to be raising & weaponizing our dead to work against us.

Even when this story is not being spelled out in detail by the invisible (yet very talkative) space aliens in question, it’s also reinforced by narration that just refuses to quit (or at least fade into the background temporarily). The endless narration is a blessing in disguise, as the film’s continuous use of stock footage & mock headlines would make very little sense without a vocal guiding hand. There’s a lesson at the heart of Invisible Invaders (that is thankfully spelled out for those not paying attention) that there are dangers in “the race for atom supremacy” that could be avoided if the nations of the world decided to stand side by side in a common cause instead of competing for the top spot in global supremacy. That message, however, is a little weak in comparison to the film’s surface, Ed Woodian charms: a body-snatching zombie plot; hilariously disconnected stock footage; very sciencey science labs featuring all kinds of smoking, bubbling liquids; and the kind of adorable practical effects you would expect in a 50s film in which you weren’t allowed to show aliens physically attacking the planet, due to their invisible nature. It’s a lot more likely that a modern audience would find the film entertaining for those cheap, campy thrills than its moralizing about the nuclear arms race, but it’s an adorable film all the same.

-Brandon Ledet

Escape from Tomorrow (2013)

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threehalfstar

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The tale of Escape from Tomorrow’s production is much more infamous than anything within the film itself. As the story goes, writer/director Randy Moore was hammering out some daddy issues he associates with the Disney World theme park in Orlando, Florida by staging a guerilla film shoot within the park. Filmed without Walt Disney’s permission, Escape from Tomorrow follows a family of tourists around the park, including shots staged in the resort hotel rooms, restaurants, and the amusement park rides themselves. Promising to turn the fantasy land into a live-action nightmare, the film has essentially been reduced to an anecdote about its production, without a whole lot being said about its actual quality. I went in expecting a dark, twisted sci-fi slow-burner that milks the park’s artificiality for an unnerving effect, but what was actually delivered was much more playful & amusing.

Backing up the director’s claim that he made the film as an exploration of his relationship with his father, Escape from Tomorrow’s protagonist is a hapless, lecherous doof of a man who drags his miserable family through Disney World as a means to forget his troubled employment status & loveless marriage. The characters sport the subtlety & nuance of an 80s sitcom family here. The kids are more or less whiny brats. The mother is a humorless shrew. The father is slack-jawed lecher that gets obnoxiously drunk & openly ogles giggling teen girls in the park in plain view of a wife he openly despises. As I’m sure happens often in that Florida sunshine, this group of Disney World tourists is having a full familial meltdown, even without the more sinister aspects of the plot & imagery coming into play.

The acting leaves a lot to be desired in Escape from Tomorrow (I desperately wish the idiot dad were played by Rob Huebel or Ken Marino), but there’s a sense of purpose to the family’s phony, exaggerated mannerisms. The whole film just feels playfully & intentionally . . . off. There are CGI decapitations, a pious reverence to the Epcot dome as a religious symbol, intentionally crude green screen shots that counteract the documentary feel, real life evil Disney queens (sex-crazed, of course), and a persistently cheesy Old Hollywood score that underlines the intense artificiality of the whole affair. It’s not a subtle film. It is, however, a delightfully goofy & irreverent one.

Anyone looking for a deep, prodding indictment of the nuclear, American family unit or a super creepy sci-fi freakout are likely to be disappointed by Escape from Tomorrow‘s who cares/nothing matters tone. The film succeeds in its quest to compose a film almost entirely from shots “stolen” from within Disney World (although the word “Disney” is bleeped out for legal reasons), but much like with all merchandise shoplifted from within those gates, the narrative it runs away with is frighteningly empty, like well-crafted kitsch. Much like with a lot of Disney products, it looks great & has an interesting backstory, but it’s a lot more satisfying as an eccentrically goofy trifle than a work of “serious” art.

-Brandon Ledet

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962)

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fourstar

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Did you know that in the year 2001 we conquered long-distance space travel, achieved nuclear disarmament, and handed over the entire world’s sovereignty to the United Nations? Me neither, but I was really into shitty rap-rock & sneaking even shittier beers at the time so I might’ve been too distracted to notice. Needless derision aside, you really do have to admire the optimism of Journey to the Seventh Planet’s version of 2001. Years before the moon landing, the end of the Cold War, and, hell, even JFK’s assassination, the film felt like the world had its whole life ahead of it. Journey supposed that by 2001 we’d have a good enough handle on space travel to make it all the way to Uranus (sadly not pronounced the fun way here), but instead by that time we’d never made it past the moon and a lot of people were listening to Limp Bizkit.

Journey to the Seventh Planet did get one thing right, though: the universal appeal of 60s era pin-up girls never truly faded. The film tells the story of a small, all-male (of course) rocketship crew who journeys to Uranus (teehee teehee) and discovers that it looks an awful lot like California wilderness. This similarity is not only a frugal cost-saving measure, but rather part of a super cool plot device in which a nefarious alien spirit hypnotizes the rocket crew and brings their subconscious visions to life. During the atomic age opening monologue about the end of the arms race and the world-governing UN, a narrator warns “There are no limits to the imagination and man’s ability to make reality out of his visions is his greatest strength.” Apparently this extends to the visual re-creation of California forest & breathable air, but that’s not all. As the crew is composed entirely of lonely, horny, red-blooded space travelers, their hallucinations begin to take the form of voluptuous pin-up models who lure them away from safety one at a time so the alien spirit can try to hitch a ride back to Earth in their stupid, horny bodies. It’s pretty damn adorable.

The pin-up models and a forest covered Uranus are the most unique aspects of Journey to the Seventh Planet, but they’re far from the movie’s only charms. There’s also a plethora of adorable atomic age sci-fi staples like model rocketships, dinky rayguns, science babble about “atomic units” & “retrorockets”, and strange green lights that give the film a less-artsy Planet of the Vampires feel once the illusion is broken. The hypnotized men also conjure up images of stock footage “giant” spiders and stop-motion Harryhausen-esque cyclops lizard monsters that are legitimately pretty awesome. There is no shortage of cool ideas and goofy practical effects in Journey to the Seventh Planet and I much prefer its space alien pin-up version of 2001 to the much more depressing Limp Bizkit reality. I honestly believe that if it had chosen the much more memorable title Journey to Uranus it would have a much larger cult following, if not only for the juvenile giggling it would be sure to induce.

-Brandon Ledet

Tusk (2014)

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onehalfstar

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Somewhere at the heart of indie staple Kevin Smith’s horror debut Tusk lies a scathing takedown of toxic hipster irony the likes of which I haven’t seen since the Tim Heidecker’s starring role in The Comedy. The problem is that the film itself is just as self-indulgent & grotesquely ironic as the subject it’s supposedly lampooning. Tusk succeeds to gross-out viewers on almost a Human Centipede level of depravity in some of its bodily horror, but those moments are isolated images in a largely masturbatory genre exercise that was conceived in a conversation during an art form best known for encouraging masturbatory exercises: the podcast.

Tusk was conceived during Kevin Smith’s podcast and the film is framed in that same context, beginning with the sounds of self-indulgent laughter & aimless conversation that often sinks the likeability of the art form. The host of the program is a fatally ironic Justin Long (along with his sidekick, a disturbingly adult Haley Joel Osment), who plays the toxic hipster persona right down to the bushy walrus mustache. That mustache is an effective bit of foreshadowing, of course, because Long’s character is rewarded for his cruel radio program’s “cringe humor attack shit” (he’s like an effete Howard Stern) when he is abducted by a serial killer who intends to turn him into a humanoid walrus. Once abducted, Long is punished for his podcast’s crimes against humanity by being offered this ultimatum: “If you wish to continue living, you’ll be a walrus or you’ll be nothing at all.”

The movie’s sole effecting element is the walrus transformation, which is alternately horrifying & silly. It’s a grotesque display for sure, but despite the narrative bending over backwards to explain why a serial killer would want a human walrus named “Mr. Tusk” for a companion, it feels overwhelmingly pointless. Once Long’s walrus man apologizes for his crimes against decency in the line, “I’m sorry I’m such an asshole,” there seems to be no point for the film to continue. But, continue it does. There are long stretches of who-cares dialogue about war stories & police investigations that feel like listening to a particularly self-indulgent podcast on a subject you have no interest in. Tusk’s central conceit and bizarrely specific mode of punishment is interesting, but amounts to exactly one memorable scene: a climactic walrus fight set to Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk”. That fight is the only genuinely entertaining moment in a film prone to committing the very sins of irony, cruelty, and narcissism that it supposedly abhors. On the whole, Tusk wasn’t nearly as empty or as unwatchable as I had expected (though the monotonous police investigation sublot certainly pushed it), but it was hardly worthwhile for that two minute payoff either.

-Brandon Ledet

The Voices (2015)

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twostar

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Comedy is risky. If you fail to connect with your audience the time you spend together can be brutal. Just ask any stand-up who’s bombed a set. That disconnect between audience & performer can be even more punishing if the material is aggressive. To succeed, a horror comedy has to find humor in sadism & cruelty and it takes a well-balanced, lighthearted tone to pull that off properly. Curiously enough, The Voices fails even though it nails that balance. There’s a playful party vibe to the movie (complete with a conga line) that counteracts its homicidal maniac narrative very well, achieving the exact kind of tonal balance a horror comedy typically needs to succeed. That makes it all the more frustrating that I just didn’t find it funny and, by extension, didn’t enjoy the movie outside of an occasional chuckle.

The main problem for me personally might just be an over-saturation of Ryan Reynolds. There is just so much Reynolds in the movie. He not only plays the central serial killer protagonist, but also provides the voices that the killer hears in his head, voices he attributes to his cat & dog. The idea of a talking cat & dog inspiring the crimes of a crazed killer sound like it could be played laughs rather well, but it just fails to reach anything approaching humor in The Voices. It’s not that I have anything particular against Ryan Reynolds in general. He has a natural smarm to his charisma that makes him an effective cad in films like Adventureland & Waiting, but whenever he’s supposed to be a likeable protagonist I fail to connect. That connection is made even more difficult here by the hurdles of him playing both a murderer of women and house cat with a Scottish accent. There’s some backstory to his killer protagonist’s childhood, which was plagued by an abusive father & a mother who also heard voices (attributed to angels instead of pets in her case), but it does little to make him likeable or his murderous antics amusing. Much of the film plays as if in Tucker & Dale Vs Evil Tucker & Dale turned out to be coldblooded, homicidal bullies but you were supposed to root for them anyway.

The English-language debut of Persepolis-director Marjane Satrapi, The Voices has so much going for it. Saptari provides the film a delicious living-cartoon setting, a playful atmosphere, and Disney-esque hallucinations that made the tonally similar (but much more amusing & less “on the nose”) Miss Meadows enjoyable, but here it’s all for naught. Even the adorably dorky charisma of Anna Kendrick couldn’t save the film from its core problem of being a failed comedy with an unlikeable ham protagonist. When comedies don’t work there’s just no way for an audience to enjoy themselves. I wish I could’ve laughed at the dialogue coming from Reynolds’ talking pets; I wanted to find them hilarious. Instead I was blankly staring at their stupid, little CGI mouths and hoping for the run time to be over quickly. I’m sure there are plenty of people who will be laughing right along with The Voices’ admirable brand of goofy, black humor, but it’ll be a total chore for whoever finds themselves watching in silence, unamused. Trust me.

-Brandon Ledet

Miss Meadows (2014)

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threehalfstar

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In the opening scene of Miss Meadows, a primly dressed Katie Holmes (as the titular Miss Meadows) tap dances down a suburban sidewalk, whistling whimsically at the CGI squirrels, birds & deer that surround her as if she were a real-life Disney princess. This reverie is interrupted by all-too-familiar street harassment as a lecherous man attempts to lure her into his dirty pick-up truck with salacious commands. In response, she shoots him in the neck. Miss Meadows describes itself as a Pulp Fiction Mary Poppins, but it plays  more like a Cinderella Death Wish, its central character acting as a no-nonsense vigilante that stands as a dividing line between decency & bloodthirsty, frothing-at-the-mouth criminals. It could also be described as Serial Mom: The Early Years and Batman in Pretty Dresses.

Much like with Death Wish & Batman there is a moral grey area in Miss Meadows’ worldview. According to Miss Meadows herself, “There are bad people in the world and they shouldn’t be around the good people.” She means that people are either wholly “good” or wholly “bad” with little to no further nuance in their worth as human beings. Miss Meadows, of course, believes herself to be one of the good ones. She tap dances, reads poetry, dresses immaculately, calls her mother regularly, dates a cop, sings in the choir, plays hopscotch, giggles during sex, knits, gardens, brings her neighbors tea & crumpets, and teaches a 1st grade class about the virtues of courage & kindness. She also, you know, murders people she doesn’t deem worthy to be alive. At one point she even admits with acidic honesty that she would rather criminals die than cost taxpayers in the penal system. That’s pretty damn cruel for someone who’s supposed to be a model citizen. Even Batman had his limits.

It’s difficult to tell exactly where Miss Meadows falls on its protagonist’s genteel brand of vigilante justice. It has the inauthentic feeling of a fairy tale or a moralizing allegory, with only children & a dog named “Frank” being honored with first names and most characters being addressed solely by handles like “Miss Meadows” & “The Sherriff”. The exact nature of the central moral, however, is more than a little muddled. A supposedly reformed criminal seems to question Miss Meadow’s good person/bad person worldview, but eventually she’s more or less proven to be right and his reformation unravels. Then again, Miss Meadows’ own mental health is quite poor and she reveals a little too much of herself in an exchange with a criminal where she shouts “I’m not crazy! You’re crazy and I’m nothing like you.” Judging Miss Meadows on its merits as a moral tale is a tricky proposition, one that doesn’t flatter its likeability. However, as a detached-from-reality vigilante story with a campy mean streak (and an admittedly low body count, in case that’s what you’re looking for), it’s quite pleasant.

-Brandon Ledet