It would appear that in the dingy, smog-locked city-state of Malaria where “Igor” takes place (think Tim Burton’s Halloweentown after a century of urban sprawl), people are not happy being what they appear to be on the surface. Igor (voiced by John Cusak), born into a caste of untouchable hunchbacked henchmen, dreams of transcending his lowly post as sycophant switch-puller to one day become a successful evil genius. One of his early inventions, a rabbit (Steve Buscemi) to whom he’s given the power of immortality, wants nothing more than to kill himself (which he attempts and fails at every opportunity). Igor’s also managed to revive a brain in a jar (Sean Hayes), which, though hopelessly dimwitted, continually professes a vast intellect that he simply doesn’t possess. And then, of course, there’s Eva (Molly Shannon), the hulking, wildly misproportioned lead monstress. Created specifically in a bid to win Malaria’s Evil Science competition to be the baddest, beastiest, bone crushingest bio weapon in history, she far prefers picking flowers and playing with the blind orphans down the road. Her lot is made worse when a brain washing mishap fails to convert her to an axe murderer and instead transforms her into a Broadway show queen.

Though it all sounds like a recipe for some good macabre fun, it’s a sad misfortune that, much like the films main monstress, the materials at work (every one of them grave-robbed from superior sources) are desperately mismatched and poorly stitched together. The wan, expressionist production design (a carbon copy of Tim Burton’s better works), creates a sharp contrast to the decidedly Wonder Bread voice work, and the inexplicable application of an upbeat Louis Prima soundtrack serves only to further confound an already unstable formula.

As story points are repeatedly spoken out directly, one gets the sense that the filmmakers are aiming at very simple minds, and one imagines that even an 8 year old would smell the condescension. For a matinee crowd, the dialogue often veers into uncomfortably adult territory. And if they are aiming at 8 year olds, is it really prudent to expose them to elements like suicide, murder and mass destruction as jokes? The difficulty in puzzling out exactly who the filmmakers are trying to please really makes the whole experience fairly unpleasant.

The subtext of the film, however, may be the creepiest part of all. Malaria is portrayed as a once happy farmland community, over which a blustering leader has draped an unending poisonous storm and reinvented the economy to be based around a main export of high-tech intimidation. The funniest thing in the whole movie may be that for all the Haloweeniness on display, the whole thing is just an elaborate mask for Hollywood liberal propaganda. If only it could have been happy enough being a fun little kids’ movie, as it would appear to be on the surface, perhaps it would have been better for everyone.