Calling Nurse Meow (2022) Review
Billed as being in the style of old-school Troma exploitation films, a couple of segments are even set in Tromaville, Calling Nurse Meow is a collection of eleven shorts by six directors Laura Barker, Joe Cash, Jason Impey, Dan Urban, Kaylan Jordan-Sen, and John W.T., all linked together by the presence of Nurse Meow (Kitty Kiss/Laura Barker, Nekrology, The VHS Strangler – The Giallo Tapes) who also serves as the between segments hostess. First introduced in the film Carnal Monsters she’s a woman in a cat costume who communicates by meowing.
From what I gather several other characters are also from that film or other shorts by this film’s directors. Since this is my first encounter with them, I may have missed some of the humour that those familiar with them might get.
The opening segment “Nurse Meow and the Hunt for Sexy Bigfoot” from director John W.T. (Unknown Serial Killer, DeathFace) and writer Sam Kurd (SeaView, Geek Love) sets the tone. A group of idiots venture into the woods with an obvious toy rifle looking for a sexy Bigfoot. Amidst a load of piss, shit and fart jokes they find Nurse Meow, a rapist gets his dick bit off, someone else gets beaten to death with a sex toy and a woman wearing gorilla gloves shows up and kills one of the hunters before hooking up with our heroine. All in less than ten minutes.
If that sounds offensive you can stop reading now because that’s mild compared to some of what follows. Indeed there’s some animation in one segment that’s pretty much straight-up, so to speak, porn. I did say this was an exploitation film, didn’t I?
And what follows is all over the map as Calling Nurse Meow bounces from Joe Cash’s segment pairing the already fetishistic cat girl with the latex-costumed Nurse Spanks (Alexxa Vice, Fake Taxi, I Fuck on the First Date 1) and other characters with names like Professor Areola to “Excalipurr” an Arthurian spoof directed by Kaylan Jordan-Sen who co-wrote it with Ian Sen. That segment sees the topless Nurse Meow in stuck in what looks like a cat door in the middle of the woods. Whoever can free her from it shall become king. Of course, such a literary inspiration still doesn’t prevent them from working in dick, poop and pussy jokes galore.
My favourite of Calling Nurse Meow’s segment however actually is actually deadly serious. Dan Urban’s “Hideout” showcases Meow’s violent side as she slowly and bloodily kills a pair of bank robbers who picked the wrong place to hide. It manages to be effectively creepy as she toys with her victims, even disappointedly prodding them after they die. Also on the serious side is “Hatred” by Jason Impey (Woods of Terror, Zombie Lover), a father (Martin W. Payne, Video Shop Tales of Terror, Monstrous Disunion) and son (Kieran Johnston, Viral, Visions of Filth) find out the hard way that mistreating a feline is a bad idea.
Unfortunately, segments like “Kittynip”, a psychedelic music video and another music video that ends Calling Nurse Meow are pointless padding. And the animation I mentioned earlier is shoehorned into another pointless segment. They might work individually as shorts, but they feel out of place here just and slow the film’s pacing off. How much you enjoy the rest of Calling Nurse Meow will depend on how juvenile your sense of humour is. I certainly laughed at some of it but other jokes were more likely to make me shake my head.
However, enough of the jokes do work and Nurse Meow makes for an interesting enough central character, as well as an entertaining hostess, that Calling Nurse Meow did work for me. Feel free to adjust the final rating depending on your own sense of humour. if there is a sequel though, I think I’d like to see more segments, or even a long short, like “Hideaway”. I think she’d make an excellent horror villainess.
Calling Nurse Meow has been playing festivals and will be released sometime next year by Vipco. You can check the film’s Facebook page for an announcement of a date. While you wait, FilmTagger can suggest a few similar titles.