Worse Than the Rockies!

Hello readers. It's been a while since the last post on Year of the Beard; like the Rockies, I took most of May off. This was partially due to having things to tie up at work, partially due to the NHL playoffs, partially due to getting settled into a summer routine (not a routine, really, just a rotation of food, beer, swimming pool, and Xbox), but primarily due to the overwhelming blah-ishness I've felt for the Rockies. They were playing bad baseball, then everybody got hurt. Not much more to say about it than that.

At any rate, it occurred to me that as painful as it can be to watch a Rockies game lately, it can't possibly be the worst way to spend a couple hours, can it? The answer is no, it can't... not by a long shot. There are many dumber things to watch, and with that in mind, I present the first issue of "Worse Than the Rockies" Movie Reviews!!!

Worse Than the Rockies: CAT PEOPLE

The first film on the list is an erotic horror film from the early 80s called Cat People. This was a silly film with some truly disturbing images... most of these images, however, involve Malcom McDowell completely naked and/or attempting to have sex with his sister. Oh, and a lot of big cats growling and staring in slow motion. Yes, things that involve no motion may still be filmed in slow motion, and yes, it's boring. Don't believe me? Then watch this film... it will act as both proof it can happen, and as punishment for not trusting me.

Irina is a sexy young girl who arrives in New Orleans to live with her long-lost brother Paul, who is clearly a creep from the very first scene, and clearly horny for his sister by the second. That night, a hooker finds disgusting goo on the bed and promptly gets mauled by a panther, and the next day a Handsome Zoo Keeper is called in to capture the panther. (The best terrible scene early in the movie: the hooker is in a panic, crawling down the stairs to escape the panther under her bed. She tumbles down the last few steps, turns around, and sees her mangled and bloody leg. She screams in horror, and just at this most awful moment... her bra pops open, complete with a little "poink!" sound effect.)

The HZK puts this dangerous panther in the zoo, where it roars a lot. Irina, still sexy but with her brother mysteriously missing, wanders around New Orleans without a bra until she just happens to reach the zoo, where she stands before the panther cage, sketching the thing for hours and hours until the HZK chases her away for some reason. Naturally, they fall in love, but not before the panther rips Ed Begley Jr's arm off and the blood splooshes into the drain in slow motion. In the very next scene, the panther is mysteriously missing, some disgusting goo at the bottom of the cage the only clue to its disappearance.

Irina's brother Paul mysteriously reappears and cuts right to the chase, explaining that he needs to have sex with her. This suggestion creeps her out and she runs away, making an unexpectedly athletic leap off a balcony. A cop finds her running away from the house with her clothes half-ripped off, screaming like a banshee. The cop takes her back to the house where, in a awkward scene, a second cop with a police dog just happens to stroll by and the dog starts barking wildly. Despite the fact that the plot had already given the cop a perfectly good excuse to check out the house, he was about to simply drop Irina off at the same door she'd just been running from, but he decides that the dog might be onto something and they should maybe look around inside the house a bit after all. In the basement, the cops find (duhn duhn duuhnnnn...) a panther cage filled with hooker bones.

"So Paul must be a maniac who raises killer panthers and kidnaps hookers for panther food!!!" the movie suggests, and the characters nod their heads and shuffle off to follow that notion, but the discerning viewer knows better. Maybe if they hadn't named the film Cat People, I'd have been even a little surprised the first time a person turned into a cat. But this entire movie is like a conversation with a kid who thinks he's really, really tricking you good, but he keeps it going for so much longer than necessary that you end up far more irritated than amused.

To make a stupid story short, the rest of the movie involves Irina discovering that she has the soul of a panther, or something, inside her just as her brother does, because their ancestors slept with panthers. Or something. As it turns out, if you're a cat person, when you get horny you turn into a panther, and when you kill somebody, you turn back into a horrible person with a terrible haircut. If you have sex with a sibling, however, the curse is lifted. Why? Who the hell knows, but I guess there has to be something creepy in this movie, and that's as close as it gets. Naturally, Irina does not believe such nonsense, until one night at the HZK's romantic swamp hideaway, she gets up for a midnight snack, walks around naked in the moonlight for a while, and then eats a fuzzy little rabbit she spots with her catvision.

The final act of the movie is a truly bizarre mix of gratuitous nudity, a blatantly unnecessary panther autopsy (complete with more disgusting goo and The Thing-style grossout effects), kinky bondage, the death of a character awkwardly introduced earlier for no other reason than to be killed later in the film, weird otherworldly vision/dream imagery, basic cheese-movie dialogue ("Every time it happens... you tell yourself it's love. But it isn't. It's blood. And death."), and plenty of extra nudity. They really should have just called it Nude People. One nude scene in particular stands out: Irina is standing behind a window and takes off her clothes. Her face, chest, and arms are visible behind the panes of glass, but the window is wide open at the bottom, which I took as the movie's way of screaming, "Check it out, man! It's bush!!!! See, right there through the open window?! Yeah, man! Yeah!!! High Five!!" Thanks for nothing, movie. I suppose when Nastassia Kinski was a huge sex symbol, a glimpse of her short & curlys may have been a worthwhile payoff for a bunch of 15-year old boys to sit through this turd, but by this point I was so annoyed at this movie for wasting my time that I just kind of started laughing at it.

The movie ends with a new panther captured at the zoo, and the HZK feeding her meat right out of his hand. She doesn't eat him or bite him because she loves him, because it's Irina!!! She just sits there in the cage as David Bowie sings the Cat People theme song. The movie freeze-frames on the panther as it stares at the camera long enough to make you very uncomfortable, and then after what seems like at least 90 seconds of this, the cat growls and shows its teeth, and they freeze on that for another couple minutes as Bowie continues to wail and the credits roll. Thank god.

Cat People earns a Worse Than the Rockies score of 3.0 Dingers. Only Kinski, some nice images of New Orleans, and a brief scene featuring Annette O'Toole swimming was able to save it from a perfect 4-Dinger score.


The next film I will review will be Evan Almighty with Steve Carell. The topic of discussion will be: if you don't laugh once through an entire movie, is it really a comedy? Till next time, Go Rockies!!!