fuck cats

January 2020.

A friend and I enter the movie theater for what we didn’t know would be the last time before the world went mad.

We saw the 2019 musical movie Cats.

We knew it was going to be bad. Anyone could tell that from the trailers. But we weren’t prepared for just how mind blowingly awful it would turn out to be. This was no movie. It was an abomination, an accident given form. An hour and a half of hideous, writhing CGI figures spawned from a madman’s reverie. The sheer enormity of the incompetence and bad decisions on display was nothing short of mesmerizing, and by the time it concluded with the rousing, life changing assertion that “cats aren’t dogs”, I was left questioning my life decisions, and as my friend and I stumbled out after ninety minutes of audiovisual torture, I only had one question in mind above all else:

Why? Why did we pay money to see such a terrible movie, even knowing it was going to be bad? What is it about bad movies that has such a strange allure? Perhaps it’s the sheer spectacle of seeing product with so much wasted effort behind it, a perverted fascination with failure on such a grandiose level. But has this always been the case? Have we, as a society, always had a fascination with bad movies like this?

I couldn’t rest easy. I had seen Cats, and I needed answers. I knew I had to write about this to get this lingering parasite of a question out of my head. Henceforth, I took to the archives of history, researching other notoriously bad movies, plunging into over a century of garbage in order to try and answer the burning question: why did I watch Cats?

My studies took me back further than I’d anticipated. In order to try to answer the burning question, I had to go back to a time even before cinema, to the turn of the last century. Here is where I stumbled across a historical oddity predating cinema itself: an eccentric socialite by the name of Florence Foster Jenkins. A wealthy, powerful woman in her day, Jenkins is remembered to this day for her singing abilities: or in this case, complete lack thereof. Recordings of her still exist, if you’re so inclined to seek them out. Jenkins was a self described opera singer, but what made her most unique was her notorious incompetence, unable to carry a tune, butchering song after song without remorse. Yet, for some reason, she held an audience at every show. She was regarded as a punchline, yet, as she famously said, no one can argue that she didn’t sing. This was a woman that gave it her all, and while she wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, she still had people that enjoyed her performance, albeit as a joke. This gripped me almost immediately: this woman’s career predated cinema itself, yet she still garnered the same sort of attention as future bad movies.

I had a theory starting to form. But I needed more.

Digging a bit deeper, I investigated a figure I was already acquainted with somewhat: 50s cult filmmaker Ed Wood, whose work in the low budget B movie genre was cursed with critical and financial failure, and for good reason, yet something must have kept him going; his career spanned for decades, and he never stopped working until his death. Much like Jenkins, Ed Wood seemed to genuinely love his “art”, and always tried to make the best movie he could. It’s admirable, in a way; despite being a catastrophic director, there is genuine passion behind the camera. In preparation for writing this, I sat down and watched his most notorious attempt at filmmaking, Plan 9 From Outer Space. It’s bad on every level, showing all the hallmarks of a bad movie; incomprehensible plot, nonsense dialogue (“He’s dead, murdered, and SOMEBODY’S responsible!”), technical incompetence, robotic acting, everything you could ever want.

But why did I want to see that?

Moving forward a few decades, there’s no end of bad movies that I could discuss. The rise of the exploitation genre opened the floodgates for a true caravan of garbage; poorly made shoestring budget movies made at breakneck speed to turn a profit. Generally awful, but at this point, I was there for it. The next big name, however, came not from exploitation movies, but from an entirely different genre: 1975’s Rocky Horror Picture Show. When it comes to discussing fandom and bad movies, Rocky Horror needs no introduction. Despite getting negative reviews on release, the movie is now world famous for its midnight screenings, where audiences participate in heckling the movie, singing along, and just generally having a good time. It started as a way to mock the movie, but has taken a strangely sincere turn over the years; people revel in the badness, rather than reject it, and celebrate the campy musical extravagance of it all.

Finally, I left the lipstick smeared realm of Rocky Horror behind and pressed on, entering familiar territory for myself. What bad movie discussion would be complete without talking about the one and only Tommy Wiseau, whose 2003 film The Room has been described as the Citizen Kane of bad movies. It is a truly baffling piece of cinema helmed in almost every area by Wiseau himself in an unforgettable performance, for better or worse. I was no stranger to The Room, having watched it several times in the past. Seeing it again was like revisiting an old friend. It’s just as bad as I remembered it being, of course. If not worse. The Room, much like Rocky Horror, has garnered the tradition of midnight screenings, and has become perhaps one of the most famous bad movies in modern times, due in no small part to the book and subsequent film adaptation of the bizarre history behind the film’s creation. I think everyone should watch The Room at least once in their lifetime, if only to experience what bad movies really are.

So. Florence Foster Jenkins. Plan 9. Rocky Horror. The Room. All these have a strange, alien appeal in their own right. But what was that appeal exactly? It was time for me to stop digging through the archives and start asking the hard questions. And I think I’ve solved the riddle.

All of these, while undoubtedly bad, come from a very sincere place. Florence Foster Jenkins genuinely enjoyed her work, and entertaining people, even if she couldn’t do it well. Ed Wood too adored the craft, and his catastrophes were made from a desire to do good. Rocky Horror was an homage to other popular genres of the time. And no one could ever say that Tommy Wiseau did not pour his heart and soul into making The Room, in an earnest, misguided attempt at making an Oscar worthy drama.

And there, I think, is where the answer lies. Not every bad movie is enjoyed in the same way as something like The Room. What makes movies such as these special is the intent and effort behind them. No one ever sets out to make an intentionally bad movie, and when the years of hard work result in a disaster, the morbid curiosity to see the results is just overwhelming. Not to point and laugh, though of course there’s plenty of that, but to see just how much can go wrong when making a film.

So where does that leave Cats?

I suppose the answer of why I went to see it is answered there. I went in expecting it to be bad. I wanted to know just how much of it had gone wrong, to rubberneck at the cavalcade of bad decisions. But what makes Cats different is that it’s not bad in the same way that Plan 9 is. While I don’t doubt the genuine intentions of the filmmakers to make a good movie, Cats goes above and beyond where the movies I’ve talked about here go. The difference is, Wiseau, Wood or Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien did not have as much financial or creative backing in their endeavours as Cats did, and were more or less on their own when it came to actually making their movies, making them singular, earnest visions from creative minds. Cats is a different beast. Everything about it feels like a mistake made by a faceless, out of touch committee. The extravagant A-list cast, the overblown budget, the Oscar winning director lazily slapped on to spearhead the project. Everything about Cats feels devoid of any real soul, a clumsy, shambling amalgamation of concepts tossed together in a blender in an attempt to make money and win awards. Instead of a pleasant blend of ingredients, Cats is a pre-ordained slurry that assaults the senses, with nothing but cynical intent behind it.

I went in expecting a genuine attempt at filmmaking gone awry, a future classic of bad movie nights. What I got instead was far worse, and what I saw disgusted me. Not just because of the hollow corporate bitterness on display, but because the end result, with its blaring, obnoxious tunes desperately trying to get you to feel something other than repulsion, and its uncanny grinning hairy faces, should be marketed not as a family friendly musical, but as psychedelic horror.