The Cat-astrophic movie you’ll soon be lapping up
Is the health crisis going to give the critically mauled Cats an unlikely renaissance? Tim Robey reports
Cats is trending again on social media. Don’t be shocked. There’s hardly been a day since the film’s December release when some sort of Cats-themed nugget of news hasn’t appeared on Twitter or Instagram, whether it’s James Corden and Rebel Wilson dressing up in furry costumes to present the award for best special effects at the Oscars, or the film sweeping the board at the anti-oscars, the Golden Raspberry Awards, or Razzies, for worst cinematic underachievement.
The latest flurry of attention came on Tuesday when stoner comedy star Seth Rogen put it on at home. The result was… confusion. “It is truly trippy,” he tweeted some way in. “Am I supposed to know what a Jellicle is?” A score of additional tweets followed, including “The mice!?!?” and “Some cats in pants. Some no pants”. One comment reflected the horror all of us have felt, deep down, about the Judi Dench cat wearing a cat fur coat.
Anyone who’s seen it will empathise with this bewildered breakdown. But while Rogen’s transfixion may have happened under quarantine, it’s far from an isolated case. Fascination with the awfulness of Cats continues to spread. Revival screenings have since sprung up, including two sell-out ones at London’s Prince Charles cinema, headlined The Jellicle Ball, inviting audiences to arrive in cat drag and sing along.
The Prince Charles has a tradition of interactive cinema. Having made a wild success of special Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings, it’s applied the same idea to The Sound of Music, Moulin Rouge! and Grease, and enjoyed similarly packed houses.
It needn’t even be a musical. Or any good. The cult of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, the legendarily abysmal indie often dubbed the worst film ever made, has been sustained by midnight Prince Charles Cinema specials in which fervent “fans” throw plastic spoons (and shout “Spoon!”) at the screen every time they see one of several framed photographs of spoons that sit on the sideboard of the titular room.
With The Greatest Showman, the critically derided PT Barnum musical that became a shock audience favourite, this treatment approached campy nirvana, because it had songs, was something people might actually turn up to see, and was also most of the way to terrible. Cats goes the whole hog. Critics – guilty as charged – have paid £13.50 to attend and gawp anew
Now we’re selfisolating, it might be time for a ‘Cats’ drinking game
at the film’s horrorshow stylings. At the time of writing, this weekend’s Jellicle Ball had only just been cancelled, abandoning the Darwinian idea that anyone willing to leave their home for a repertory screening of Cats deserved everything coming their way. I was really looking forward to it.
And yet a grave paradox thereby arises. For it is yours truly who gave Cats zero stars. You won’t find me racing, let alone paying, for a repeat viewing of many one- or two-star films, or even many threes, given how much quality cinema exists. And yet Cats somehow got its claws in.
I wonder if I gave an adequate account of the film’s bizarre watchability. It’s a critical cliché to call something “unwatchable”, but Cats attacks this yardstick – much like everything – from a different angle. Indeed, it’s the very opposite of unwatchable. While it’s unfolding, you feel like Malcolm Mcdowell in
A Clockwork Orange, eyelids peeled forcibly back while the nightmarish imagery parades before you. There is nothing to be done but watch. Perhaps I should have awarded it five furballs, or 26 fish carcasses, or some miscellany of other dustbin treasures.
Whatever. Now that we’re all looking for ways to survive self-isolation, it must be time for a Cats drinking game. Mix a Miaowjito, or some evil shot of your choice called Cat Nip, and tip one back every time the camera zooms into an actor’s digitally altered crotch; every time Corden delivers a catthemed joke or pun on the word “paw”; and every time there is a neck nuzzle or nose rub. When Ian Mckellen laps extravagantly from a saucer, you’ll be doing the same, if you remain conscious that long.
As tourists on Planet Cats, the only options are paralytic or bust.