Meat Friend
It’s all part of the great circle of life, happy cows grazing in a field which then become slabs of meat hanging in a freezer locker before being ground into mince then finding themselves packaged in cellophane to be unwrapped by young Billie and placed in the microwave, a magic box in the kitchen corner which instead of making tasty burgers creates Meat Friend!
A friend to all good children but who wisely stays out of sight of pesky parents who wouldn’t understand him, Meat Friend imparts lessons such as how to make a prison shiv or the importance of creating the impression that a convenient death is an accident, encouraging and inspiring Billie, though smarter than her teacher she begins to question the scenarios he suggests…
With an appropriately jaunty theme tune and friendly lettering on the titles, Meat Friend is a short comedy horror directed in conscious bad taste by Izzy Lee from a script co-written with Steve Johanson who also provides the voice of Meat Friend, with Marnie McKendry as Billie and Megan Duffy as Mom, at first tolerant of her daughter’s imaginative games but increasingly dubious about her uncharacteristic behaviour.
A neatly packaged apparently tasty treat which recalls the subversive incongruity of Wonder Showzen with all kinds of unsavoury additives lurking in the mixing bowl, Meat Friend is presented as though it were a lost episode of a sinister children’s television show, tapping into the undercurrent which drives so much of that genre where the young come under the influence of strange visitors to whom their guardians remain oblivious, left to fend for themselves when things inevitably go wrong.
Meat Friend will be available on the Arrow platform from Friday 12th April
