Director – Christopher Jopp (Harold Crumb, The Well)
Starring – Charles Hubbell (Transylvania Television, Werewolf Prevention and Protection), Eleonore Dendy (Cured, Bobby’s Run Off), and M.P. Johnson (It Came from Trafalgar, Doomed to Consume)
Release Date – 2016
Rating – 3/5
It’s been a while since I watched a horror short so I thought I would mix it up a bit and check one out. Sometime ago I became friends with bizzaro author M.P. Johnson on Facebook. I enjoyed their anthology Berzerkoids so I keep an eye on all of Johnson’s projects where I saw that he was in the horror short Meow.
It looked fun and had that late 80s/early 90s vibe so I reached out to him where I was able to get in contact with the film’s director Christopher Jopp. We started talking and he was kind enough to send a blu copy my way. Thank you M.P. and Chris for helping me see this short.
**Spoiler Alert**The film follows a young woman who has moved out on her own into her first apartment. Her landlord is very strict and keeps reminding her that she is not allowed to have pets in the apartment when something strange happens. She finds a cat and falls in love with it.
She moves it into her apartment and risks being caught by the landlord but things take a grisly turn when she spots blood in her apartment. She quickly learns that this lovable cat is something far more savage.**Spoiler Alert**
I thought Meow looked fun and the artwork reminded me a lot of the Stephen King adaptions from the 90s. Don’t ask me why it did but it did. In actuality, the film was nothing like those at all but more like a horror film from the late 80s aimed towards children.
The acting in this one is fun. The entire cast looks like they really enjoyed their roles. Eleonore Dendy was great as the innocent and young Samantha that falls in love with the cat. She was perfectly cast for this and is perfect in her role. Charles Hubbell as the landlord was pretty funny regardless if it was intentional or not. I really enjoyed his character and performance. Also, M.P. Johnson does a great job as the pizza delivery guy.
The story for this one is straight forward but does take a twist at the end. It was well written and made very good use of the short’s running time. However, I feel as if the film would have been more effective if it was just a little more darker and something more was done with the cat.
Finally, this one has some blood but is not as gory or bloody as most would prefer. As I stated earlier, the film could easily be aimed towards children and is not that gruesome. The blood looks good but the film honestly doesn’t hit with the buckets of blood like most modern horror films. Overall, Meow was fantastic. It looked good, flowed well, and had a solid cast. This is the type of fun I miss in horror.
