A Meowy Christmas

I've been following Steve ever since I picked up a film of his at Cinema Wasteland and I have always been impressed with how he seems to hate the idea of only making one kind of genre as an artist. His last family film was a few years ago and now after several horror movies he's back with a loving homage to as many Christmas films as possible.

One of Steve's signatures seems to be that he takes everything that makes up the genre he's tackling, puts it into a blender, and purees the heck out of it. Expectations are either sent upside down or delivered in entirely different ways.

And this film is no different while still being child appropriate. For the kids we have the cut animals, cat puns, visual gags, and slapstick. For the adults we have a parody of Info Wars, inversions of tropes of the genre, and as many references to other Christmas films as can fit into a single hour.

The animals are adorable. The voice acting is surprisingly top notch, especially from Amie Wrenn as Whiskers herself. The acting is hit or miss, the burglars are really great but many of the other cast are only okay (nobody is bad). Funny enough the stand out to me is Rudzinski himself as the lead detective, who feels like the lovable idiot you could place in almost any children's film and it would feel right.

This is obviously a cheaply made film, but aside from the few locations it doesn't feel like it. Shots look solid, editing feels smooth enough, the music is at times hilarious, and above all the script is hilarious. I've seen quite a few of these talking animal movies and Meowy Christmas might be my favorite.

Definitely worth a viewing no matter what age you are. I was very pleasantly surprised by this one!