In a reasonable, fair-minded realm of movie assessment (i.e., one not dictated by fear of saying something that might get you branded as politically incorrect), Jordan Peele‘s Get Out, a decent but far from perfect B-level horror film that explores subterranean racial animus among liberal elites, would have a Rotten Tomatoes rating of, oh, 85% or 87%. And a Metacritic rating in the mid to high 70s. It’s simply not good enough to have a rating in the mid to upper ’90s, and the idea of a horror-comedy with the sensibility of an ’80s-era John Carpenter or Wes Craven earning a perfect 100% score is flat-out ridiculous.

But that’s what Get Out has right now, and Metacritic has given it an 83% positive. This is what you would call an avalanche of generosity. Another way to describe it is a conspiracy of cowardice on the part of at least some of the critics out there. Yesterday I was all but accused of being an Imperial Wizard of the Southern California chapter of the Ku Klux Klan because (a) I called the premise nervy and intriguing for the first 45 minutes but (b) expressed regret that the film loses juice the more it embraces conventional horror tropes, and that the VFX are cheesy and the writing (particularly the ending) is sloppy.