Uggh.

This was a hard one.

(This week’s movie is Cat’s Eye, starring James Woods and Drew Barrymore, screenplay by Stephen King, based on some previous King stories with original content added)

I went into Cat’s Eye with an open mind. Firestarter was ok, and the other King anthology we’ve seen to date (Creepshow) was of course excellent. How bad could Cat’s Eye be?

Really fucking bad. Really, really fucking bad.

You know you’re in for a bad ninety minutes almost from the start, as the film opens with a sequence of a cat running from monsters from previous King films. The chapter title from the DVD case says this is the ‘King Menagerie’. Riiight.

So you have a reprise of big, slobbery, bad makeup Cujo, and then a Christine clone (helpfully labeled with a bumper sticker in case you didn’t get the red Plymouth Fury reference) almost runs the cat down.

That’s it, that’s the whole gag. You’re wondering through the bit when the third shoe will drop, after all, it takes 3 things to make a pattern, right? Nope. Not only is it cutesy and overly self-referential, it feels incomplete… but it does provide fair warning for the remainder of the movie. Cat’s Eye isn’t a horror film at all; it’s a comedy. Only.. not the least bit funny.

A slight digression here before the plot spoilers. As I sat watching the three segments of this movie (tied together, sort of, with the cat as a framing device), I got to thinking about the nature of Black Comedy. Why does Creepshow work, and why doesn’t Cat’s Eye?

The conclusion I came to was this: a good black comedy like Creepshow is so dark, plays the horror so straight, but ladles it on so thick that it becomes funny by virtue of being a bit much*. Combine that with a garish but consistent art style and some quality acting, and you’ve got a watchable film.

Cat’s Eye instead starts with a shallow foundation of PG-13 grade horror and then piles on a bunch of goofy fluff as a topping. You’ll have a decent horror premise, then a bunch of sight gags and, yes, slapstick to interrupt the mood. It never gives you a chance to be horrified, or to bond emotionally with the people on screen in any way.

Plot discussion ahead:
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Ok. This brings me to another point about where Cat’s Eye goes wrong, strays from the path of noble Creepshow: it abuses and then neglects its framing device. Creepshow has a fairly simple thread tying its disparate stories together: they’re all out of an issue of a fictional EC style comic read by Stephen King’s kid, err, I mean, some random kid with a voodoo doll. They use animation and lots of little comic book art flourishes to keep the stories grounded in this device.

Cat’s Eye also has a framing device, and it could have been a good one: the cat from the introduction ties all these stories together, wandering in and out of human tales of woe. The cat is the audience, the witness.

Only it’s not that simple. There’s also a ghostly little girl that appears in windows, begging the cat to find her. Why her? Why a cat? Fuck only knows. She might be the same little girl from the last story segment, she might not. Drew Barrymore plays the little girl character several times in this film, which means that just because it’s one Drew Barrymore in the windows, it doesn’t mean the cat (later named General) has finally found the RIGHT Drew Barrymore by the end.

Not that they care. After a certain point the whole ‘mysterious ghost girl’ angle is just dropped entirely, and never mentioned again, leaving the frame both ambiguous and unsatisfying.

Ok, so the cat runs from Cujo and Christine and ends up in the first segment, adapted from Stephen King’s short story ‘Quitter’s Inc’. ‘ Quitter’s Inc.’ is only one of a number of King stories about the perils of cigarettes. Or rather, the perils of giving UP cigarettes. Weird, huh?

It works on the page though. ‘Quitter’s Inc.’ is a creepy story with no supernatural elements about a shadowy little company that guarantees you’ll stop smoking, one way or another, and the heinous methods they use to ‘help’ you do so. It poses a reasonable question, albeit clearly from the perspective of a nicotine addict: how far are you willing to go to stop smoking? To stop someone ELSE from smoking? How far can you go to protect someone else from themselves, to make them healthier, and what are the limitations of benevolent do-gooderism when it interacts with personal freedom?

‘Quitter’s Inc.’ in the film, on the other hand, is full of really goofy sight gags and slapstick humor. It also may or may not feature a man pissing himself; that’s ambiguous.

James Woods doesn’t seem to know whether he’s playing a horror victim or comic relief here, and Drew Barrymore appears, very briefly, as his retarded daughter. We see her so little, you might not guess she is retarded, so the movie makes sure you see she attends a School for Exceptional Children. I’m not entirely sure why they wedged her in here, except that, well, they had Drew Barrymore, they were going to USE Drew Barrymore, goddamnit!

Heh.

Oh yeah, watch for a hi-LARIOUS gag where Woods bitches about bad writing in The Dead Zone. Showing us a clip from a great movie like that in Cat’s Eye isn’t just cutesy self-referential crap, it’s salt in the wound. For shame, Stephen, for shame.

The next segment is an adapation of ‘The Ledge’, another Stephen King short story. I mentioned in the Creepshow review that my roommate and I both regard the Creepshow segment ‘Something to Tide You Over’ as an adaptation of ‘The Ledge’. Both involve a crazy rich husband arranging an elaborate death trap for his adulterous wife’s boyfriend. In both stories, the crazy husband watches the action on a series of videocameras; in both stories he offers the boyfriend the chance to leave if he’ll forfeit seeing his wife again, etc etc. It’s pretty similar.

‘The Ledge’ in Cat’s Eye is, again, played for a comedy with a shaky horror foundation. It starts out well enough, introducing our three star-crossed lovers, and has a nice bit involving the rich husband’s compulsive gambling, where he and a yuppie companion bet 2k dollars on whether or not the cat from the framing device will be run down in the street. The rules of this game help to establish the character’s odd sense of fair play; a bet’s a bet, and you never back out, but within the bet, anything goes. He’s free to save the cat from traffic if he wishes, to earn his 2k. His friend is free to lure the cat into certain death. It’s an odd sort of honor, and an interesting way to play games in real life. This chacterization had real miles to go, I thought. A villain you can respect, even as you root for the hero, is something to hold on to, and this man’s odd code of honor could give you something to admire, even if only for its consistency.

After he snares the boyfriend, however, he starts hamming it up, dancing around and cracking jokes, and the stupid comedy intrudes again onto a promising story. Eventually he convinces the boyfriend into the death trap, which involves walking around the ledge under his penthouse apartment in Atlantic City. If he makes it, he wins his freedom and the woman he loves; apparently, though it’s not made clear, he also gets a stack of cash. Refuse to go, and the rich bastard will frame him for heroin dealing.

See, this would normally seem like a stupid bet to take. What leverage do you have to enforce it if you win, after all… but we’ve already seen that although this man and those in his circle play for blood, they honor their bets.

Then of course Mr. Rich Bastard pulls a series of stupid stunts as the boyfriend makes his way around the building, which could have been horrifying attempts to win the wager but come off as petty dickishness. There’s a half-assed twist worthy of M. Night Shamalamading dong, and the cat escapes to his next story. Wheee.

After a long ride in a truck, or series of trucks, the cat ends up in an accent-free section of North Carolina for the largest segment, and one not based on any King story that I recall. There’s a little girl (no points if you guess who plays her) in a house with loving Mom and Dad. She falls for the cat at first sight, but Mom doesn’t want her to have it, and then when they let her keep it, insists that the cat sleep outside.

Oh yeah, the girl has insomnia because of bad dreams about a monster that comes out of her bedroom wall, a troll like in Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Well, the cat sneaks into her room, or doesn’t, and gets blamed for scattering her toys and shedding hair all over the room. It’s not clear if the cat was actually there and Drew’s covering for it, or if it was just… THE TROLL, WHICH IS REAL!

Duh-duh-DUH

Also, it wants to steal her breath. Trolls do that now. They’re also 2 inches tall and wear a goofy jester’s hat.

Seriously.

(Watch for yet another King self-reference when Drew’s mom is reading in bed. Yessir. Run that gag into the ground and bury it Steve. Bury it *deep*)

Well, the cat won’t stand for that troll offing its meal ticket, and there’s a confrontation, a series of them, the cat escapes from the pound after being blamed for the troll eating Drew’s other pet, a bird, and so on. Blah blah blah. The last confrontation comes off like a mediocre Gremlins clone, what with the splattery gore and silly pratfalls involving a pint-sized monster. Afterward, there’s a fakeout on a better ending, but don’t worry, you’ll get a cutesy one (of course).

So that’s Cat’s Eye. Three unsatisfying stories, bad comedy, an abortive frame, and Drew Barrymore basking in her Firestarter glow.

I bought a bottle of tequila after this one, folks. It’s ready and waiting for the next movie; silver tequila, which is appropriate because next week we have:

Next Week: Silver Bullet! Tequila, ahoy?
Last Week: Firestarter, not just a song by Prodigy.