Rating: 2/20 (Emma: 4/20; Abbey: 3/30)
Plot: The titular cat!?! brings a pair of families together.
"Is that a cat?" You'd be surprised how many times that line is in this movie. This is a movie about some people who apparently have never seen a cat before. And that's weird because there are several times when the cat gets up and walks away and you can clearly see cat food on the floor. That leads me to believe that these are people who have cat food but who aren't sure what a cat looks like. And that's the real mystery of this movie. This is one of those movies where all the pieces come together so imperfectly to produce something so beautifully awful that you want to tell everybody you know about it. The acting isn't the worst that you'll ever see, but combined with everything else, it seems almost magical. The worst offender is Eric Roberts who provides the voice of the cat. The cat is fine, but Roberts sounds like he was locked in a closet, fed nothing but vodka and oatmeal pies, and forced to read his lines. He mostly sounds tired, and when he doesn't sound tired, he sounds bored. When he doesn't sound tired or bored, he sounds like he has come to a point in his life where he despises himself and his maker. Johnny Whitaker isn't a realistic father or millionaire, but he's got a soul patch and does a great Bogart impression. Justin Cone is awful as his son, surly and effeminate in cut-off jeans. He nails one line though: "I did see a cat--that one!" Soap star Kristine DeBell is just as bad playing a character who doesn't need oven mitts when taking things out of an oven. She does play exasperated well, probably because that's how she feels about having to be in this movie. The music is also terrible, and whoever scored this thing should be put to death immediately. I know that sounds harsh, but we're talking about somebody who threw a MIDI version of "La Cucaracha" in this thing. This is clumsily written and poorly paced. I was convinced halfway through that this was possibly written in under a half an hour. Cheese puffs were mentioned extraneously, the explanation of the cat's powers of human speech were never explained in a way that made sense, and the human characters seemed to have been created by people who have never heard human beings interact with each other before. Most impressive of all might be the special effects that allow the cat to talk. I was confused about whether the cat was "talking" to the human characters telepathically, but the magic of special effects made it clearer later with an animated black mouth. Dreadful, the kind of special effect that makes you feel sorry for everybody involved in the production of this so that you start weeping in front of your daughters. This is the type of movie that is around ninety minutes but seems like it goes on for ninety days, sad since it was really about twenty-five minutes of movie padded with random shots of a waterfall and some trees. In fact, the only thing that might have been in the movie more than nature shots were shots of the cat's butt hole. That thing popped up so many times in this movie that I began to wonder if it was intentional.
Good news: A Talking Pony!?! is in post-production. It features DeBell and Whitaker, so it must be a sequel. Also, director David DeCoteau has a movie in post-production called My Stepbrother Is a Vampire!?! I almost wish I was making the punctuation up.
It's possible that I'll see a worse movie this year, but this is a strong Manos contender right now. And Roberts, in a voice-acting role, just could grab himself a Torgo. He's really that bad here.
