Eric Roberts, what have you done?
Recently, a new movie sensation has been making the rounds in the z-grade movie fan community. This movie showed up on Netflix a few weeks ago, and a few of my friends have talked about nearly nothing else since. My friend Aric even started a new blog entirely dedicated to this movie.
This movie is called A Talking Cat!?!
Watching it is like staring into the abyss.
This film involves two single-parent households wherein each character has problems, and the conclusion involves the two families getting together to solve each other’s problems. In between, the titular cat talks to each person. Once. Because those are “the rules.”
The cat is played by, well, a cat with a clumsy digital line sometimes drawn over its mouth. The voice of the cat inexplicably comes from Eric Roberts, who sounds stoned and/or drunk and/or phoning the audio recording equipment from another planet. My personal theory is that director David DeCoteau stumbled across Roberts in a bar, surreptitiously recorded Roberts whilst he was in the middle of an insane rant of some sort, and then directed a movie around it Bowfinger-style. I believe that with all my heart, because it gives me more hope for humanity than the possibility that the script was intentionally written that way.
The non-feline characters are similarly baffling. One is obsessed with cheese puffs. Another is driven to attend “business college”. They all act like extraterrestrials in human-suits.
And then there is the slowest, synthiest version of “La Cucaracha” I’ve ever heard in the soundtrack.
Depending on your personal sensibilities, A Talking Cat!?! will either be excruciating or hilarious to watch. I found it dreadful at first, but at some point, it ate a part of my brain and the hilariousness kicked in.
As a connoisseur of terrible cinema, I’ve genuinely enjoyed a lot of shitty movies. But I’ve also endured some stinkers that simply stay stinky. As the folks from Mystery Science Theater 3000 and How Did This Get Made? know all too well, there’s a difference between great-bad and bad-bad. A Talking Cat!?! is just inside the great-bad box.
There seems to be a new vogue for films like this. At Butt-Numb-a-Thon last December, I came up with the term “exquisite incompetence” to describe things like The Room, Birdemic, A Talking Cat!?!, and the entire oeuvre of Neil Breen. I think the fame of these films can only exist in a world with The Internet, because I think fascination with films like these can only come from an audience that is so overloaded with the language of media and fascination with FAIL that spectacular levels of cinematic incompetence become their own hilarious meta-entertainment. I don’t think it’s so much pointing-and-laughing at the clueless; I think it’s celebrating the fact that each film’s terribleness has cluelessly plunged toward the bottom of the barrel that it has smashed through the other side and become a sort of victory in itself. There’s a reason why, in certain circles, the names of Tommy Wiseau and Neil Breen are spoken with a strange reverence.
In a weird way, these films really are genuinely entertaining. They are a celebration of innocence, because these films can only ring true if they are made without self-awareness. These films speak to the American dream that anyone — no, seriously, anyone — can stumble upon some sort of success. And, honestly, at the end of the day, these men and women created a feature-length film that entertained the masses, which is more than most of us can say.
