Do you wonder what it would be like if you could talk to cats? I know I do sometimes (though most of the conversations would probably be about food and cleaning the litter box). Unfortunately, so do Hollywood film producers, who have decided that it’s a good idea to put money into movies about talking cats. Now I’m not talking about animated movies featuring cats or about anthropomorphic cats, I’m talking about live-action movies with a real-life cat who speaks to humans. Welcome to the small, but gut-wrenchingly awful subgenre of cinema that is Talking Cat movies.
I was aware of a movie called A Talking Cat?!?, which looked dreadful and extremely low budget, and I knew they had made a Grumpy Cat TV movie for Lifetime, but I hadn’t considered the 2010s talking cat movie its own pitiful genre until July.
It started when my friend Richard posted the trailer for a movie called Nine Lives in my friends’ group chat, jokingly saying, “omg guys, Kevin Spacey is a cat. This looks amazing.” When I watched the trailer, I already knew this thing was going to be a festering piece of shit. Kevin Spacey is an ungrateful corporate head who gets turned into a cat and hijinks ensue in what’s probably the laziest, most overdone plot in the history of Hollywood. This movie looked like 90 minutes of pain. In short, I had to go see it.
I’ve loved bad movies ever since my parents got me into Mystery Science Theater 3000 in middle school. I like laughing at them or entertaining people through my pain while watching. I’ve made it through the Nicholas Cage Wicker Man, I’ve made it through The Star Wars Holiday Special twice, and I’ve made it through The Room three times, so I knew I could beat anything Nine Lives threw at me.
The weekend Nine Lives came out, I asked my friend Sarah if she wanted to see it. She’s not quite on my level of movie pain tolerance, but hers is higher than most of my other friends, so she’s my go-to bad movie friend. We met up and expected it to be bad, but somewhat enjoyable because of it.
It wasn’t.
Nine Lives sported a surprisingly A-list cast: Kevin Spacey, Christopher Walken, and Jennifer Garner, and it was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, director of the Men in Black series, cinematographer of a lot of early Coen Brothers movies, and executive producer of no less than six TV series, including the Netflix adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events. The talent involved made the movie that much more tragic.
Billionaire and CEO Tom Brand (Kevin Spacey) is on a mission to build the world's tallest skyscraper. In his determination, he ignores his young daughter's birthday. She wants a cat more than anything, but he hates cats. He grudgingly decides to get her one to make it up to her, so he goes to a bizarre pet store run by an eccentric man named Felix Perkins (Christopher Walken) where he buys a cat named Mr. Fuzzypants. On the way home, he stops by his mega-building and goes to the roof, taking the cat with him since it’s slightly better than leaving him in his car. However, there’s a lightning storm and Tom falls, suffers a severe accident, and goes into a coma. His consciousness is switched with the cat’s, as explained by Christopher Walken, who apparently is the only one who can talk to cat Tom (Oh my fuck, is he named Tom because he’s a tomcat? Jesus Christ, movie). Now a cat, he starts to spend more time around his family and comes to learn how he’s been a neglectful father and what’s important in life, as the story always goes.
The lighting was offensively bright. It was like someone turned up the saturation of every bright color they could get their hands on. The reds were exceptionally red. I don’t know how else to describe it other than the fact that there was a lot of big, bright, bold, obvious, unabashed red, so much so that it stood out. The movie had the aesthetic of a cheap plastic kids toy, and honestly, that’s not the worst way to view it as a whole.
Kevin Spacey’s performance was more phoned in than a man calling someone over the phone in order to do his job. You really start to wonder how the hell he went from House of Cards to this abomination. Why, Kevin? Why did you do this? How much are they paying you? If there’s someone behind you holding a gun to your head, blink once. Christopher Walken, though, I heard takes every role he’s offered just because he likes acting, so I’ll give him a pass. Still, this is definitely a movie none of the actors are going to want on their resumes.
The movie takes a surprisingly dark turn at the end when Tom’s adult son, heir to the company he’s about to lose because of a corrupt executive, decides he’s not good enough, and that the best solution is to jump off the top of the tower and kill himself during a publicity stunt involving a parachute. Tom learns that love means sacrifice, so as his son jumps off the building, Tom runs off the roof to fall after him. His son is wearing a parachute, but intends not to pull it. This leads to a beautifully awful scene where Tom and his son are falling at the same speed and staring each other in the face (because that’s totally how physics works) and Tom lifts his kitty arms up, telling his son to open the parachute and save himself. The son is amazed, so he does, and lands safely while Mr. Fuzzypants plummets to a certain death.
Of course, we don’t see this because the movie cuts to Tom’s human body finally coming out of a coma just in the nick of time before they pull the plug, like they should have on the script before it was ever produced. Tom is awake and he realizes his mistakes and patches up his relationship with his family. But what about Mr. Fuzzypants? WELL, he’s alive and well in Christopher Walken’s shop when Tom and his daughter go in to buy another cat. He’s “used up one of his lives,” according to Walken, but he’s available to be taken home. And it’s a happy ending. Except the corrupt board member’s soul has now been transferred to another cat Walken owns as a form of punishment so he can learn his lesson and become a better person. It soon becomes clear that every cat in Walken’s shop has an entrapped human soul in it. The credits rolled, the lights turned back on. Sarah and I were a little shell-shocked.
“I can’t believe you made me pay $6 to watch that movie, Noah,” she exasperatedly told me as we walked out of the theater. “I cannot deal with the with the implications of a world where Christopher Walken is a reality-manipulating serial killer who traps people's souls in feline bodies as a form of vigilante justice,” she added later.
That sums it up pretty nicely. Rotten Tomatoes holds Nine Lives at a meager 11%, with the consensus “not meow, not ever,” which is fitting on both counts. It was 90 minutes of pain, lazy screenwriting, phoned-in acting, bad cat puns, overly cheesy emotional moments, and every cliché imaginable, capped off with a surprisingly dark ending. At least the cat was pretty cute.
When I got home, I messaged Richard and his girlfriend Kendra about Nine Lives, since they were going to see it the next day.
“Richard and Kendra, I’m so, so, so sorry, you guys,” I wrote.
“Lol was it really that bad?” Richard wrote. I said it was.
Kendra then replied, "It can’t possibly be worse than the Grumpy Cat movie.”
This sounded like a challenge.
I had to find out. I had to know. I had to undertake this important research. It was a duty to myself, my friends, and my writing career, no matter how many brain cells it would rob me of and how much alcohol I’d have to drink to get through it all. This was necessary. This was no longer just a “see a bad movie and laugh about it” situation. This was an odyssey. A masochistic, feline-filled odyssey, but an odyssey nonetheless.
For better or for worse, Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever is uploaded in its entirety to Vimeo, so I at least didn't have to cough up more money to torture myself. I cracked open a beer and pressed play, determined to find out whether or not Kendra was right.
For those of you who don’t know, Grumpy Cat is a cat with a disorder that makes her look like she’s frowning all the time. She became a huge internet sensation and a staple of meme culture a few years ago. So, Lifetime Channel bought the rights and made a holiday movie about her because Capitalism.
Grumpy Cat, voiced by Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza, lives in a pet store in a mall in a nondescript city owned by a Mr. Crabtree, whose big dog is worth a million dollars for some reason. He doesn’t want to sell the dog because it’s somehow keeping his business afloat. All the pets talk to each other and all yell “pick me!” when someone walks into the store, though the humans can’t hear them. Crystal is a misfit teenage girl who hangs out in the pet store. She feels lonely because she doesn’t really have friends, outside of Mr. Crabtree, the mall Santa, and the guy who plays an elf.
Lo and behold, she gets her wish! That night, her mom hosts a Christmas party and invites the friendly mall elf, who seems to be in love with her. Crystal is bored with the adults, so she leaves to go to the pet store after hours, and when she does, she can talk to Grumpy Cat! (WOW, is that not a Christmas MIRACLE?!) However, two dumb rocker guys (you know they’re dumb because one of them defends Sammy Hagar Van Halen) are also in the mall after hours to break into the pet store and steal the dog, so Crystal and Grumpy have to work together to get him back and save the store.
Aubrey Plaza actually kind of works for the cat because she’s plenty sarcastic. Her voiceovers are not as bad as I thought they’d be. The actress who plays Crystal is also surprisingly decent for a made-for-TV movie. It looks like she’s actually trying, which is probably the only favorable comparison to Kevin Spacey she’s ever going to get.
The thing the movie has going for it is the fact that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are a lot of cutaway scenes of Grumpy Cat doing various things, such as telling us she expected this level of melodrama from a Lifetime movie when the mother and the elf fall in love, half-jokingly promoting Grumpycat.com and the merchandise you can buy there, and becoming a pampered celebrity after a guy comes into the pet store and tells Mr. Crabtree he’s going to make her into “the most famous internet meme!” (spoken like somebody who knows absolutely nothing about how the internet works). There are a lot of moments where you feel like the movie is tugging on your arm and saying, “LOL, look, it’s funny because it’s the INTERNET, right?!?!” Most of this humor fails and makes you cringe, but the self-awareness redeems it. It’s charmingly cringey, which is better than the sheer pain of the serious, heartwarming intentions of Nine Lives.
The third act of the movie is where it really starts to go off the rails and descend into the realm of the ridiculous, and not in the good way like in Blazing Saddles. Like a modern Snow White, Crystal rallies the animals together to chase the bad guys and evade the mall cop (who gets bitten in the crotch by the million dollar dog).
When in the sporting goods store (an obligatory battleground in every movie set in a mall since the beginning of time), Grumpy Cat finds a paintball gun, sets it up, loads, and fires it accurately at the bad guys in a matter of seconds. This was the point where I started wondering why I was doing this to myself. Later on, Grumpy rolls into the mall driving a Camero (with both paws on the steering wheel and the engine revving) and urges 12-year-old Crystal to take the wheel. The climax is Crystal and Grumpy playing chicken with the bad guys in the mall’s parking lot to the theme music from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I felt bad for Ennio Morricone, one of the best film composers to ever live, to have to be associated with this movie in any way, shape, or form.
The bad guys crash and are arrested. The mom, her elf lover, and Mr. Crabtree show up and rescue Crystal. Crystal tells them, “Mom, you told me you wanted me to make friends, just never with who,” as she holds up Grumpy. I checked to make sure the trash can behind me isn’t too full or far away so I could turn around and vomit in it if need be. The movie ends on Christmas morning, when the mother hands Crystal a Christmas Wreath with Grumpy in it. I didn’t need trash can thankfully, but it got close.
Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever was bad, but not as bad as I felt it could’ve been. It had enough self-awareness and halfway decent acting that it was at least watchable. I wouldn’t, of course, go back and re-watch it any time soon, but it had nothing on Nine Lives. I made sure to warn Kendra about this to brace her and Richard before they suffered.
I had completed the challenge and I had tested Kendra’s claim, but somehow my viewing experience felt incomplete the next day. I remembered the trailer for A Talking Cat?!? (the punctuation is actually part of the title) and how awful that looked, and how it was the beginning of my awareness of bad talking cat movies. Plus, if two movies makes a trend, three makes a genre, and it was only 85 minutes more. It felt like the perfect capstone to the ordeal, so I pulled it up Amazon Prime and pressed play.
A Talking Cat?!? features two families—Family A and Family B. Family A consists of Phil, a rich, retired, and bored software person living in a mansion, and Chris, his awkward loser of a teenage son he doesn’t get along with. Family B consists of the unnamed mother trying to get investors for her fledging catering business, her son Trent, an unmotivated teenager, and her daughter Tina, Trent’s twin sister (who looks several years younger) who wants nothing more than to go to "business school" for programming and software. They are poor and live in a small cabin in the woods. These woods are a short walk away Family A’s mansion, which is also somewhere near a tropical beach because they relentlessly show B-roll from. If you figure out where the hell it’s set, let me know.
Duffy the magic talking cat wanders in from the forest and observes both families before deciding to help them. He’s a self-proclaimed “human whisperer” who likes helping humans with their problems, but the catch is he can only talk to each person once. He’s voiced by Eric Roberts, Julia Roberts’ obviously less successful brother, who sounds like he’s sleep-deprived, hungover, and on his fifth cigarette in a row as he records the voiceover in somebody’s echo-y kitchen.
The production values make everything worse. Imagine the world’s cheesiest, most upbeat music you could possibly make with a low quality keyboard, a shaker, and a free drum beat you downloaded the internet all combined into a riff that’s put on repeat for two minutes and accented with whimsical cartoonish whizzes and whistles and you’ll get an idea of how god awful the main theme music is. The rest of the music is no better. I’m pretty sure there are a few themes that were made with MIDI instruments. Also, whimsical zings come in any time there’s a joke, and they make me want to light my computer on fire and toss it out the window because they amplify the pain of an already unfunny joke to nearly unbearable levels.
Duffy tells Phil to go for a walk to clear his mind. Phil follows his advice and meets Family B on the way, and he hits it off with the mother. He soon starts visiting regularly. Duffy, meanwhile, individually talks to all of the characters and offers them life advice.
Unlike in Grumpy Cat, when Duffy speaks, his mouth actually moves, but don’t consider that a good thing. Duffy’s mouth is a solidly black oval placed over his mouth during post-production. It gets larger and smaller when he’s supposed to be speaking, but it’s not synced up the dialogue. It’s possibly the cheapest way to make an animal look like it’s talking, and it’s so bad and extremely fake that it feels out of place. I highly recommend watching clips just to see this marvel firsthand. It makes Nine Lives’ dated CGI look like the latest superhero movie.
Once Tina realizes Phil is a tech person, she hands him a code she’s been working on. Phil is impressed and invites her and Trent over to his house to work on it. The code is an app that catalogues your wardrobe and suggests outfits from it (because clearly the only thing a female coder could possibly come up with has to do with clothes). To use it, you run what looks like a $10 book light connected to the USB over any article of clothing you have for two seconds and it magically registers them in the program.
Despite having a pool in his backyard, Chris has never learned to swim and Frannie, the girl from school who keeps wanting to come over and “study” always wants to go swimming with him (because that’s apparently the sexiest thing people can do in family movie). Chris keeps turning her down because A). he’s a loser and B). he’s afraid of drowning. But he’s in luck because Trent is a former swimming instructor. He teaches Chris how to swim in a scene seeping with homoerotic vibes. This isn’t helped by each of their fit, hairless chests and the cheesy porno music that plays in the background. Is it any surprise that the director also does PG-13 softcore gay porn?
However, the mother shows up and she’s really upset with Phil because she needed the kids on cheese puff duty because she had a meeting with a key investor that day, so she takes them home and makes Duffy sad because his plan has fallen apart.
The movie has a strange fascination with cheese puffs. Cheese puffs the mother’s specialty and a cornerstone of her catering business and they become a focal point of the movie. Some lines about cheese puffs include: "I'm losing money on those cheese puffs.” "If you're not making cheese puffs, then you're grounded." "Geez, Phil. You ruin the lady's cheese puffs and her business, all in one day." "The investor meeting is not going well, and I don't have cheese puffs!" "Cheese puffs, wafting across the pool deck; two families enjoying each other's gifts... yes, things are working out much better.” After watching the movie, I asked director David DeCoteau on Twitter what his cheese puff recipe of choice is. He never responded and I’m still sad about it.
On his way to Family B’s house to fix things, Duffy is hit by a car and is severely injured but fortunately Family B finds him in time and they take him in the house. To be clear, when I say Duffy’s severely injured, I mean the cat looks completely fine except for a strip of gauze loosely thrown around his neck. It’s one of those things where it’s best just to take the filmmakers’ word for it. He tells everyone that the only way to save him is to find his magic collar in the woods, which supposedly gives him his power. They find it lying very obviously on a rock and Duffy is back to normal after a scene of pure magic, shown through really crappy special effects of floating green balls and light emanating from Duffy’s magic collar. The characters make up, Chris gets with the girl (despite the fact that I’m seriously questioning his sexuality) and because he’s grateful, Duffy decides to stay with them and they’re all united as a family. The nightmare ends with a vaguely reggae rendition of “Itsy Bitsy Spider” that plays over the credits.
The movie clocks in at just 85 minutes, but because it’s such a boring trainwreck that it feels like years of your life have been taken away. Nine Lives was painful, Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever was cringey, but my fucking god, A Talking Cat?!? takes the cake (or cheese puff) and then some in terms of terribleness. The acting is wooden, the special effects look like they could’ve been done on Windows Movie Maker, and the music was so consistently tacky that it all made the movie completely irredeemable. The only solace was its ridiculous obsession over cheese puffs, the horrifically misfired humor, and Duffy himself, who I think was the cutest of the three cats.
My official ranking of 2010s talking cat movies is Grumpy Cat > Nine Lives >>>>>>>>> A Talking Cat!?! Kendra was wrong about the Grumpy Cat movie being worse than Nine Lives, but nobody was right. There are no winners, only survivors. The moral of the story is stay away. Never watch any of these films unless you’re a masochist. Stay far, far away and be glad that I suffered so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.
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