| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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THE CAT
(Wei Si Li Zhi Lao Mao)
Rating: 
Hong Kong. 1992.
Director – Nam Lai Choi, Screenplay – Gordon Chan, Producer – Choi Lan, Photography – Mak Hoi Man, Music – Chan Fei Lit. Production Company – Golden Harvest.
Plot: Police detective Wisely is drawn in to helping a beautiful woman, an old man and a cat living in his apartment building. He discovers they are involved in the theft of an octagon artifact from a museum. They explain to him that they are really aliens that have been stranded on Earth and need to the power octagon in order to return home. But at the same time a giant monster, capable of possessing dead bodies, also tries to obtain the octagon and takes over the body of Wisely’s partner.
This Hong Kong entry jumps in on a mini-spate of cops-vs-aliens films that were inspired by The Hidden (1987). As a film it is so dissociated from plot as to be almost totally incoherent. However coherence is never something that Hong Kong cinema has ever really considered a necessity.
Hong Kong films are worth seeing for their way-out imagination. The film goes overboard on the heavy artillery, delighting in slow-motion shots of guns blowing up the contents of the hero’s entire living room, or its villain rotating a machine-gun impaled through the body of a hood to gun down a room full of thugs. The real set-piece of the film is an amazingly sadistic battle between a dog and an alien-possessed cat in a junkyard – with scenes of the animals slamming one another through car bodies, being electrocuted and strangled and the cat finally getting its tail severed, which are conducted with an amazing ferocity. It is all bizarrely shot as a parody of the stylistics of A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) and Wu Xia stylistics to boot with the animal fights taking place in mid-air half the time, shot in backlit mist with every blow highlighted in stylized closeup and slow-motion. The creature effects are rather entertaining too – it a spaghetti-like mass with glowing intestines, shaped like a giant turd that flies through the air, turning into a giant Claymation animated mass as it attempts to swallow an entire skyscraper at the climax.
There are times when the film is just downright bizarre – like the would-be scenes of erotica between the hero and his girlfriend, which bizarrely focus in closeups on parts of her body, dripping in ludicrous amounts of sweat. The film also throws in jokes about Hong Kong’s then upcoming return to China in 1997. Incredible.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
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