Tyler Perry's Boo! A Madea Halloween

The Day of the Dead seems an especially apt time of year to revive Madea, a moldering comic character first unveiled in the early Aughts, as the novelty of the sturdy, 6’5” Tyler Perry cross-dressing in muumuu and saggy boobs has long worn off. But here’s the trick of this un-treat of a movie: There’s exactly one compelling performance in Boo! A Madea Halloween, and it’s courtesy of Perry. Only it’s in another guise – not as the braying Madea, nor as her pot-smoking, N-word-dropping brother Joe (another of Perry’s recurring characters) but as Brian, a single father struggling with how to discipline his unruly teenage daughter.

As a writer, director, and producer, Perry has consistently threaded compelling domestic inquires into his broad comedies; here, he explores a generational divide in parenting technique, wherein Perry’s helicopter dad Brian is horrified by his own father’s advice to “whoop dat ass.” But Perry – the writer/director – uses that as the setup for a painfully unfunny digression where Pa Joe muses about the time he threw Brian off the roof and landed him on life support. Har? Excepting Perry’s performance as Brian – which he sells in a heartfelt third-act monologue – the film is chockablock with terrible actors (including Tyga, in a bizarro cameo rapping at a frat party), and the jokes he gives his inferior cast to work with are stinkers.