Duffy: The Talking Cat

I recently watched this "film" for my podcast, where we solely review awful movies. I painstakingly sat through it twice with a stopwatch and timed all of the runtime of the movie spent on establishing shots (there are FIFTY-SEVEN OF THEM), credits, and shots of the cat lying or waddling around. This sums up the movie better than anything:

Between the credits, establishing shots, and shots of the cat, those all take up THIRTY PERCENT OF THE 83-MINUTE RUNTIME. I have never seen a movie that so blatantly pads its runtime with scenery. And what's scarier than that is that there are literally dozens of instances (that I didn't time with the stopwatch) where the human characters are shown doing nothing but sitting and looking at things for several minutes at a time, or walking up stairs, or standing and looking at random objects. It is pathetic how poorly edited and shot this movie is.

Literally nothing happens in this movie. If you don't believe me, go see it. You'll go cross-eyed before you ever find anything resembling a plot. If this thing was competently made just from a sheer editing standpoint, it would be 4 minutes long...if that.

Yep, that about sums it up.

I'm writing this review mostly because I feel compassion for Johnnie Whitaker, who deserved something better. I also feel it for the relatively inexperienced teenage actors, because they did, too. And Eric Roberts, well, I sincerely hope he got paid a lot for his literally phoned-in performance. Just a whole lot of money.

So, this "movie" (as it's been categorized). Awkward conversations that don't advance the plot, an endless series of establishing shots, and the longest and most pointless closing credit sequence ever cut together are the things you will find here. And very little else, it turns out.

Well, maybe that's wrong: there's an inadvertently gay subtext. Oh and, yes, as another reviewer observed, there is indeed a talking cat that is a key part of the story somehow.

This movie takes place in a total of two locations: A mansion and smaller house. Yet it features no less than 59 establishing shots, most of them being the same three shots of a forest stream, some trees, and an ocean with palm trees visible over and over and over again.

After watching all 59 of these establishing shots, I'm still not quite sure where this film took place. Could be the Pacific Northwest or it could be Florida. I just don't know.

And that is only the beginning of the magic this movie has to offer. It is a true masterpiece of badness.

Much like Orpheus walked into the dark depths of Hades, I myself peered into

the fiery brimstone and ashen realm of Hell to find a movie so bad, so detestable, that it

makes everything else ever produced in this world look like The Godfather. A movie so

utterly terrible that even Michael Bay would cringe at the mere sight of it. I am, of

course, talking about A Talking Cat!?! By David DeCoteau.

Yes, I did not add those punctuation marks. The legitimate title of this movie is: A

Talking Cat!?! It seems even the film itself is confused to how anybody allowed it to be

produced.

This movie was created in 2013. Unsurprisingly, it was a Direct-To- DVD release.

That means that this abomination was not shown off in theaters, which is a relief, as the

poor children who watched it would have had their eyeballs burned to oblivion.

The only redeemable quality in this film is how laughably bad it is. It makes for

good entertainment if you just want to lie around, feel like absolute garbage, and riff a

children's movie about a talking cat who speaks with his lips MS- Painted on. No, really,

that's how the beast talks. His mouth is digitally painted black to represent an open

mouth, but instead resembles an unending void of chaos and despair, hoping to leech

away at this mortal coil.

Before we discuss the plot, let's talk about production. This movie had a budget

of one-million dollars. One. Million. Dollars. I can only assume that a hundred bucks

went into the actual movie, and the rest of the money went into all the crazy drugs they

used while creating this flick. You know what else had a budget of one million dollars?

Rocky. Rocky was a pretty good film. That proves that it was not the budget that

decided the quality of this movie. The reason A Talking Cat!?! is so bad is because Mr.

DeCoteau was probably too busy tripping to be worried about, oh, I don't know, how

good his film is!

But I digress. The film revolves around a….wait for it….talking cat. What a shock.

He is voiced by Eric Roberts. Do you know who that is? Neither do I. The gruff-voice for

the tiny cat is pretty surprising, but even more surprising then that is that Roberts spent

15 minutes recording dialogue for this film in his living room. Only 15 minutes. For a

professional voice actor, and the main character, that is not enough time.

The cat protagonist, named Duffy, is a magical talking cat. Okay. I can believe

that. But what I can't believe is that this talking is limited so that he can only speak to a

person once, and just once. What kind of a lame power is that? If you're only going to

have one line for each character in the movie (note: 6 characters in the movie) then why

call this movie A Talking Cat!?! if said talking cat barely even talks?

We get to see how the cat helps people with their problems. Specifically, a father

named Phil, played by Johnny Whitaker, who is like if that one scientist from Jurassic

Park became twice as eccentric and three times as obnoxious. Who are the other

characters, you ask? Who cares? They barely deserve any recognition. I looked up the

four other actors, and it says a lot that their most prominent work is A Talking Cat!?!

This movie is like a plague. If you are in any way involved in it, you've dug your own

grave.

Let's get into the conflict of the movie. Phil's son, WhatsHisFace, is mean to his

father. Why? I don't even know. The father, even though he decorates the inside of his

house with trees and weird statues, doesn't seem like a bad guy. So why's the son

hostile to him? To drive the plot. That's all this movie is. An awful talking cat and a

bunch of things that only exist to drive the plot.

The rest of the story is just nonsense. Half of it's not even story. At least a third of

the movie are establishing shots of forests and characters slowly walking up stairs or

empty hallways.

This movie makes me physically ill to watch. It's almost as if somebody crafted

this piece just to torture me for all of eternity. If you get to buy one DVD this year, don't

buy A Talking Cat!?! Wait, no. Better idea. Buy the DVD and then burn it. Burn it to the

ground. The satisfaction that you will get from destroying this film will be worth the

money.

What Script level-0.

Acting level-0 Effort level-0 Production value level-0

-This movie was- Goddamn I can't think of anything to say.

And the fact that this is getting good reviews... I literally curled up to the darkest corner of my room, cried and continuesly asked myself what the heck is wrong with humanity and what could have we possibly done to anger God to the point of punishing us with this visual and audial hell.

I'm scared.

I need a vacation.