J Paul Johnson
I don’t like cats. And for that matter, I like Rupert Holmes’ dreadful yacht-rock earworm “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” even less. Confronted with either, I might run screaming from the room. But I will confess that writer-director Mary Dauterman makes great use of both of them in her smart, touching, indie body horror-comedy Booger. The central conceit of a human protagonist’s taking on animalistic tendencies at a moment of trauma is hardly novel, but Booger—that’s the name of the film’s cat—wreaks mirth, havoc, and even tears from the scenario.
Booger belongs to Anna (Grace Glowicki). Well, sort of, anyway. Technically, Booger, a rescued stray, belonged to her roommate and best friend Izzy (Sofia Debrushio, seen here predominantly in phone-video flashbacks), until her sudden and unexpected death. Anna’s assuaging her grief by rewatching their silly videos together, which include karaoke performances of the abovementioned Piña Colada song, their shared favorite, but it’s not going too well, and her grief is impacting her relationship with her boyfriend Max (Garrick Bernard). His fumbling attempts at intimacy have Anna missing Izzy all the more.
When Booger runs away, Anna is beside herself. The cat, in ways Anna clearly doesn’t yet understand, still represents the friendship she cherished and now grieves. Desperate to find him, she searches the streets for Booger and, in the process, gets herself bit on the hand. You might think you know where this goes next, at least if you have ever in the past century and a half read or seen any form of fiction.
Anna indeed begins to take on some feline characteristics. Were Booger purely a horror story, it might play out like The Fly. Were it superhero cinema, Spider-Man. But while both of those films mined no small dosage of humor from the situation, Dauterman dives in headlong: as Anna’s grief verges on psychosis, her behaviors become more and more strange. Her bite wound begins to grow tensile catlike whiskers. She’s constantly licking her hair, and soon enough, gagging up furballs. She develops a hankering for canned cat food—and later, vermin. She takes to the streets at night, prowling about, and later, to booze like a cat to nip. There’s more, but you will see those on your own.
Anna’s behaviors prove increasingly alarming to poor Max, who finds himself both appalled and shut out. He’s nothing if not determined, though, to assist Anna through her pain, even if his attempts at doing so are, frankly, painful to watch themselves: for some reason, he thinks serenading Anna with his own karaoke version of the Piña Colada song, the one Anna and Izzy shared, will snap her out of her grief. It’s as good a scene featuring that song (or the karaoke instrumental version thereof) as I predict any film will ever manage.
In fact, that scene deftly illustrates Booger‘s subversive genius: to take a bit of garish pop-culture yacht-rock, imbue it with a character’s heartfelt if ill-executed attempt at empathy, and mine from it both humor and pathos. What sets Booger apart is its focus on female friendship, so often absent from fiction films, and its clever execution and tone. At times, Booger, especially with its ridiculous title (channeling something like Ben, I suppose, or Willard) and basic conceit, might seem like it’s going just for the cringe of making its poor grieving protagonist barf up hairballs and the like. But with an excellent lead performance by Glowicki, astute direction and scripting from Dauterman, and key supporting work from Debrushio, Bernard, Marcia DeBonis, David Rysdahl, and Heather Matarazzo, Booger manages to make its body horror-comedy a touching tribute to female friendship.
