Uninvited (

1988

)

To paraphrase Tolstoy, “All good movies are alike, all bad bad movies are bad in their own way.” You have films that have an interesting concept like Robot Monster (1953) that they simply cannot realize because of technical and budgetary limitations. There are movies like The Creeping Terror (1964), whose creator doesn't give a shit about and are only using them as a means of embezzling as much money as possible. On the other hand, there are films whose creators view as deeply personal projects, like The Room (2003), but because they are so weird their films become almost incomprehensible to normal people. Some movies are only really suffering from one glaring imperfection that spoils the rest of the proceedings: Bad acting, bad writing, bad special effects, etc. I bring all this up because Uninvited is somewhat unique among bad movies, in that the one element that spoils it for me is the fucking sound effects. How bad are they? Well at one point early on in the film there's a car crash where an accident sends a beautiful old truck careening off a cliff. Now, I would think that the sound of a half-ton of metal and glass colliding suddenly into the ground would be a sufficiently jarring noise, but maybe there was a fuck-up with the microphone that day because the filmmakers decided they had to sub in some artificial sound effects. Fair enough, but what makes this ridiculous is the sound effects the filmmaker chose: the sound of a pane of glass shattering. Obviously, this is not even close to an approximation of a car crash, so the sound effect is repeated and played over itself, cutting in an out in an artificial fashion. I'm no sound engineer, hell my ear is about as tin as they come, but this is so blatantly incompetent that I'm sure even I could do a better job than this.

The audio fuck-ups are not just limited to this one scene though. This is a movie about a killer cat, and whenever the cat is onscreen the filmmakers thought it prudent to have the cat constantly meow. Let's just forget how unnatural and annoying this is and assume it was a good idea for the sake of argument. Cats are not dogs though, even the best-trained felines will not mew on command, so once again they inserted artificial sound effects. Here again, the sounds cut in and out without warning, sometimes even overlapping with each other. The meows are so common and so annoying that you can't just ignore them either. Plus there's the fact that most of the time the cat is in the shot, and it's pretty obvious that it's not making these noises. The sound effects are so poorly done that I'm not convinced that director Greydon Clark didn't make this movie on a bet with a collaborator who doubted the importance of hiring a competent sound effects technician. Sure, the rest of the movie isn't a masterpiece, but it displays the baseline level of competence that you would expect from a director who has been making B-movies for a decade and a half.

Our story begins with a sinister scientific conspiracy that's trying to... I don't know... take a cat and put a much larger evil cat inside of it? It's not exactly clear what the goals or even the nature of this program is. What we do know is that these guys have managed to produce one dangerous little kitty that takes the form of an adorable orange tabby until it gets pissed and vomits out a considerably larger, considerably more violent cat. Despite experimenting primarily on house cats the scientists leave all their doors open and one day the cat escapes from the examination room. Seriously? The security at most veterinary offices is stricter than what they've got for this dangerous killer feline. The cat massacres its way past the laboratory's security guards with an ease that makes me wonder why this thing isn't kept in a cage or sedated round the clock. Maybe it's because the lead scientist, played by director Greydon Clark himself, is strangely into hunting down the escaped test subject and seems overjoyed to demand the sidearm from one of the guards and go on the prowl himself. Clark's so invested in the role that he steals the show and probably comes away as the best dramatic performance in the whole damn movie. No small feat given the fact that this crappy movie has an Oscar winner (George Kennedy) co-starring in it. Too bad the cat kills him in the first ten minutes.

With Clark's scientist dead, the cat quickly flees the facility, and the focus of the movie shifts from the monster to our prospective victims. First, we meet Suzanne and Bobbi, for those of you having trouble keeping them straight don't worry, Suzanne will always be wearing blue and Bobbi will always be wearing pink (glad to see a movie that expects you to forget its characters and gives you a helpful cheat-sheet). Whether they are wearing dresses, bathing suits, or lingerie it makes no difference. The pair have come to Florida for Spring Break but neglected to book a room beforehand. Now every hotel in town is booked solid and they are at risk of sleeping out on the street. A pair of nubile young girls in need of some assistance quickly attracts the attention of Gordon Gekko wannabe Walter Graham who quickly swoops to their rescue and invites the girls for a private cruise on his yacht to the Cayman Islands.

Graham really should keep his mind on his work, he's being investigated by the SEC and one of his underlings is close to flipping and turning state's evidence on him. So, he has to hook up with his two elderly goons Albert and Mike (Mike at least looks intimidating, Albert looks like nothing so much as a lovable grandpa) and drown the stool pigeon in the hot tub in his yacht. Then it's back to port to throw a big party on the same yacht before setting sail the next day for the Cayman Islands to pull all his ill-gotten lucre from the banks there before the feds can shut him down. All and all, it's a very busy week that he's got planned for himself and there's barely a moment to spare. But you don't become the Wolf of Wallstreet if you're lacking in ambition, so Graham is confident he can squeeze some intimate time with the girls in between murders and investment fraud. If they aren't keen on him, well there's always The Implication of being out in the middle nowhere with someone they barely know.

Still, when you have a vital trip to the Cayman's to prepare, maybe you shouldn't yell at your crew off-camera and cause every one of them except for your captain to quit. That leaves you in quite a bind when the SEC is closing in on you and you have to escape with your bimbos and ill-gotten wealth in tow. Fortunately for Graham, Suzanne, and Bobbi (Or Blue and Pink) have brought along a few strapping young lads that will do as a crew in a pinch. Normally Graham wouldn't willingly bring along younger, better-looking competition when he's trying to seduce a couple of ladies, but he's facing down jail time so he takes the boys along as an impromptu crew. He also, against his better judgment lets Suzanne bring along the stray cat she's found on the docks, and wouldn't you know it's the escaped monster from the film's opening. I'm sure everything will go along just fine.

Whoever was responsible for the atrocious looped sound effects must have also had a hand in the script, as characters tend to blather-on and repeat themselves immediately. Take for instance the scene where Suzanne points a gun at Graham and he stutters his way through the same overlong apology twice before finally shutting the hell up. Then there's the scene where Bobbi and Suzanne constantly repeat the same line of dialogue “It's so hot in here” as they gradually strip out of their clothes. The later one seems to meant as a light-hearted moment, but it does seem strange that in a film with so much atrocious looped audio that the screenwriter would be similarly obsessed with repeating dialogue.

Fortunately, despite the numerous shortcomings and idiocies of the film, the central draw remains intact: The joy of watching a mutated house cat murder a bunch of obnoxious characters. There's always something fun about a group of full-sized adults getting wiped out by a shoddy-looking puppet, and this film gives you plenty of that. As a bonus, the gore effects while on the lower-end for the late 1980s are still a nice bit of practical visual effects work and consequently hold up better than the atrocious early CGI in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). There are some really neat bits where you see the wounds caused by the cat throb and pulsate spectacularly. Despite all that, I do worry a bit about the cat. Nothing in the film strays into the realm of animal cruelty (the worst thing they do to the cat is spraying him with some water), but the general demeanor of the cat seems nervous throughout the film. Now, maybe this is nothing to be concerned about, some cats are just naturally a bit skittish (hence the term scaredy-cat) but it gave me pause nonetheless. Sure, it's nowhere near the rampant animal cruelty of Hong Kong Cat III movies or the Italian Cannibal cycle, but it troubles me all the same. Maybe it's just because this cat looks like my first cat that I worry so much.