31 Movies of May, Day 2: A Talking Cat!?!
May 2nd viewing: A Talking Cat!?!, requested by Chicago Cinema Workers Fund donor Kevin Slane. Mr. Slane also donated extra money to make me drink a shot of Malört, which tasted just like Eric Roberts’ voicework in this movie sounds.
Year of Release: 2013
Directed by: David DeCoteau (under the pseudonym “Mary Crawford”)
Written by: Andrew Helm
Starring: Eric Roberts (voice), Johnny Whitaker, Kristine DeBell, Justin Cone, Janis Peebles, Alison Sieke, Daniel Dannas
Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Goofy Boots (Juicy Midwest IPA, 6.2% ABV) - Penrose Brewing Company, Geneva, Illinois
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local when getting buzzed during quarantine)
Last Christmas, we were granted an incredible gift in the instant bad movie classic that is Cats. The film was based on one of the most popular stage productions of all time, directed by an Oscar-winning filmmaker, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and market. Barely a month after its release, Cats was already generating late night novelty event screenings a la The Room. It was a masterpiece of terribleness.
Cats had a lowkey predecessor six years earlier. Like Cats, A Talking Cat!?! (complete with the wild interrobang) also involved a sentient cat that, at times, was bizarrely animated. But beyond that, and the fact that they could conceivably be titled like an awkward version of the Aliens franchise, the two films couldn’t be more different. A Talking Cat!?! was a direct-to-video release, made over the course of three days by a soft-core porn director. It was also a masterpiece of terribleness.
I have spent a substantial portion of 2020, pre-quarantine, listening to podcasts about Cats. And there are few things I have loved doing more in recent memory than listening to podcasts about Cats. The best of these, such as The Flop House and Pop Culture Happy Hour, thread the line between gleeful pile-on and celebration of the sheer audacity it takes to attempt and fail at making art. Both of the aforementioned episodes are pieces of critical art worthy of inclusion in any museum. Another of my personal favorite podcasts, This Had Oscar Buzz, deals with movies like Cats as its forte, but has promised to hold off on its Cats extravaganza until next Oscar season.
A Talking Cat!?! also reached similar heights of glory in these same podcast circles, though I was only familiar with it by reputation before finally watching it yesterday. I started listening to The Flop House in 2015, just a couple months after it released its A Talking Cat!?! episode. A Talking Cat has frequently popped up since then on The Flop House in off-the-cuff references, and it’s no small feat for any movie to achieve lasting memorability among a crew that recaps two dozen awful movies every year.
Going into my screening with that context, I knew to expect general wacky incompetence, but the nice thing about bad movie classics is that “general wacky incompetence” is one of the more unpredictable forces in the universe. My wife and I spent an hour and twenty minutes largely dumbfounded at the, uh, “artistic” choices presented on our television screen.
But perhaps more so than the actual viewing experience, the best part of A Talking Cat!?! was getting to participate in all of the discourse (diss-course?) that I had missed years earlier when the movie first popped into public consciousness. Since watching the film last night, I’ve listened to The Flop House’s A Talking Cat!?! episode, watched the RiffTrax A Talking Cat!?! commentary, and then expanded my podcast horizons to check out the A Talking Cat!?! episode of the Garbage Theatre podcast.
This kind of material is like quarantine comfort food. The unique intimacy of podcasts recreates the experience of slamming pop culture trash with your friends. I don’t know about you, but that is at least one of my favorite social activities. I suppose some of you might channel your friend activity into positivity, but you’re weird. In a way, they provide comfort similar to what you get from a police procedural on TV - each episode hits common beats, but with a slight twist to make it fresh for your viewing.
The beats for any podcast episode about A Talking Cat!?! are pretty clear. You need to make fun of the inexplicable score of repurposed carnival music (“I bet John Williams never had the guts to use a slide whistle on one of his scores” - Mike Nelson on RiffTrax). You need to make fun of the excessive establishing shots from completely disparate locations (“It just presents you with a location, and then cuts to a scene, and forces you, the viewer, to make a decision that this is where the scene is taking place. We’re as complicit in the shitty filmmaking of this movie as anybody” - Elliott Kalen on The Flop House). You need to make fun of the film presenting its titular cat as supposedly on death’s door, only to cut to a shot of the cat looking perfectly healthy with a single loop of gauze on its head (“He’s got an old-timey toothache” - Bill Corbett on RiffTrax). Perhaps most importantly, you need to make fun of one-time Oscar nominee Eric Roberts’ atrociously lazy voice over work as the titular cat, reportedly recorded in just 15 minutes from his own living room (“I think maybe Eric Roberts is kind of like a money laundering tool - ‘No, no, it’s a real-ass movie, it’s got Eric Roberts in it’” - John on Garbage Theatre).
I don’t mean to dismiss the creativity and thought that goes into each of these shows. The Flop House, in particular, has become one of my favorites particularly because of how its hosts analyze each of the films they critique, not just mocking their missteps but contextualizing them in film history and what makes individual filmmaking choices succeed or fail. But the core selling point is still the breezy, affectionate camaraderie of belittling dumb things.
I hope you weren’t necessarily coming here for that camaraderie, because this piece evolved from a review of A Talking Cat!?! into a piece about how much I, a white male in his early 30s, love podcasts (shocking!). But the underlying sweetness of these podcasts for me is the enjoyment they get out of appreciating lame things. So please humor my love of bad movie podcasts, the possibly lame thing I love and appreciate wholeheartedly.
— Toss
