‘The Cat’ or — Peak Cinema?
Before watching ‘The Cat’ (1992) last night I had to force myself into a psychotropic Zen state in order to eradicate any and all forms of pre-judgement hence existing purely as a “no-mind” placing zero demands or expectations on any possible future. Why? Because ‘The Cat’ was directed by Lam Ngai Kai, director of ‘The Seventh Curse’ (1986) and ‘Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky’ (1991), two of the most sanity-breaking movies ever made, so I was terrified that this lesser-known entry in Lam’s filmography would appear tame and dull in comparison. I had to lower even the tiniest of my expectations.
Turns out I needn’t have bothered because not being quite as deranged as ‘The Seventh Curse’ or ‘Riki-Oh’ doesn’t mean ‘The Cat’ isn’t still firmly on the completely fucking batsoid end of any reasonable metric of cinematic lunacy. Anyway, complaining that the film you’re watching isn’t as insane at ‘Riki-Oh’ is like complaining that the industrial grade LSD you’ve just ingested isn’t as potent as the chemically enhanced PCP you could’ve dropped instead.
Besides, ‘The Cat’ has a secret weapon hidden up its furry little sleeve… and that’s the greatest martial arts fight in the history of cinema. This is not hyperbole. In fact, I might even be underselling it.
After listening to his neighbour grumble about the noise from the upstairs apartment occult detective and adventure novelist Wisely logically suspects that a mysterious trio consisting of a young woman, an old man and their black cat must be aliens from outer space. After an octagonal artefact is stolen from a museum by a sentient killer mushroom Wisely teams-up with… okay look, I’m not going to even bother describing the rest of the plot because it’s so gloriously demented you’re better off watching it rather than reading about it but, for a rough idea, image a horror/fantasy/sci-fi version of Disney’s ‘The Cat from Outer Space’ (1978) only crammed with extreme violence, excessive gore and action scenes so crazy they threaten to permanently destroy the viewer’s visual cortex.
A great example of this is when Wisely mistakenly assumes the cat is evil, and what is the best way to defeat an evil cat? With an absolutely massive dog! What follows is a fight between a cat and dog that is, as I said, the greatest martial arts fight in the history of cinema.
Now when I say the cat and dog fight I don’t mean we’re watching a real cat and dog pawing and clawing at each other. No, this is a highly choreographed, elaborately staged, wire-fu action scene that would put Jackie Chan to shame… only involving a cat and a dog. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
To pull this off (and to avoid any form of animal cruelty, thank god!) Lam utilises every pre-CGI special effects trick in the book — models, stop-motion work, puppets, opticals etc — and the result is a flurry of Cat v. Dog lunacy that has to be seen to be believed.
However, this presents ‘The Cat’ with a bit of a problem — how can it possibly top something this phenomenal? ‘The Cat’s answer is ingeniously straightforward in that it doesn’t even try but, instead, simply puts the pedal to the metal and floors it to the closing credits with head-spinning speed.
The effect of being bombarded with such extreme forces of high-velocity entertainment means the viewer is subjected to inevitable temporal dilations and contractions because although ‘The Cat’ is only 84 minutes long it moves so fast its running time feels more like 15m. How can a full-length feature film feel so short? When every single frame is so profoundly bedlamite that the passing of time becomes utterly meaningless, that’s how. This means ‘The Cat’ is less like watching a movie and more like being shot into the future by a nuclear-powered particle cannon.
‘The Cat’ is a movie so exquisitely unhinged it leaves you questioning your sanity, although it also raises a deeper, more important question. And that’s — Why can’t all cinema be like this?
