The Cat

The plot of The Cat involves a novelist named Wisely, an alien girl, and her cat, who is also an alien and holds the rank of General. They must retrieve alien weapons to defeat an alien menace possessing humans before returning to their home world. If this sounds incoherent and bordering on ridiculous, I have accurately conveyed the viewing experience.

Director Lam Ngai Kai’s film plays like an eight-hour miniseries cut down to ninety minutes. Characters arrive at conclusions without logic, apology, or connective tissue. Wisely has dinner with a friend and a police inspector. They mention cat organs found in an apartment recently vacated by a young girl and her pet. Next scene, Wisely is writing in his journal that he’s convinced the girl and her cat are aliens.

The film is based on a novel called Old Cat by Ni Kuang, who wrote over a hundred other Wisely novels. Lam previously adapted another Ni Kuang property, The Seventh Curse, into a raucous cocktail of adventure and horror that worked because it never stopped moving long enough for you to think.

The Cat tries the same trick but stumbles. There is still plenty of goopy, oozing horror—a blob-like creature that electrifies and absorbs its victims—but exposition dumps necessary to connect the scenes keep the film from achieving escape velocity.

And yet, at times, it comes close.

There is a scene where Wisely borrows a hunting dog the size of a small horse and sets it loose on the alien cat in a junkyard. What follows is one of the most preposterous animal fights ever committed to film. The dog hurls the cat twenty yards. The cat waits for the dog to charge, leaps onto its back, catches the dog’s collar in its teeth, and executes a midair somersault that effectively suplexes a dog ten times its weight. It’s unbelievable, and yet magnificent. You feel the dog slam to the ground, then realize your jaw is hanging open.

This is the tension at the heart of The Cat. The incoherent plot torpedoes any chance of narrative or emotional stakes but stretching the film out to smooth the logic probably wouldn’t have helped as the performances are universally flat. The incoherent edit may actually be turning lemons into lemonade by cutting out the boring parts. Just get to the suplex, already.

One mystery remains: Ni Kuang had published roughly eighty Wisely novels by 1991. Out of those eighty stories, they chose one about an alien girl and her alien cat that includes horrific graphic violence. Who was the target audience?