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.

I mean movies this bad don't just happen they have to be forged in disinterests, recorded with apathy, filmed in boredom. It is super hard to appreciate just how bad this film without viewing it. The movie begins with us seeing a cat (not the one on the cover, a different cat) The story follows two families who are having mundane and stupid problems that even they seem to be having a hard time conveying emotions about. The first family features a fat slob who lives in a house that has so many tacky ornaments it makes peewee's play house look classy. He seems to be reaching out to his son who , rejects him? by responding to him passive aggressively. Eventually the cat shows up and neither immediately react to the cat other then acknowledging it is there . The boy we find out is an English major which he clearly demonstrated his mastery of the language to a girl he is interested in? by using some very witty words. After this we meet the next family... which had a mother who selfishly deprives her daughter encouragement with her career instead being more obsessed with her own job. She encourages her son despite his lack of faith in himself (or the movie I hope) . Some more stuff happens with both families, the daughter it turns out is looking at a website by the guy from the beginning. After all the back story is set up the cat begins talking to each one of them explaining he can only talk to them once (because why not?) and gives them the one thing they need to do in his plan to unite the families. Eventually the families meet and they seem to be moving forward (I guess, it looks more to me like they missed the part about showing emotion or being believable, I mean if the pod people were this bland... the invasion would never have gotten anywhere). The girl begins realizing that this creepy older guy can help her career so that ambition about college won't be needed (cause who doesn't want to work for a creepy guy you just met?) She goes off with him to make cheese puffs for her mom (which her mom demanded she do and grounded her for not making them) While away her mother abandons her business meeting to go look for her and her son who went over to the house and met creepy web guys son and they went "swimming together" The mother proceeds to make a huge scene... the cat realizes this stuff is getting bad so he decides to step in again... only to get hit by a car... the two families then come together "The cat talked to you?! Are you all crazy? "Yes" to get his old collar and put it on him and a magic dander orb flies off his fur after it begins illuminating a bright gold color. "What happened?" "We did something"... immortal words. At the end we get credits and see the actors who all appeared in some scenes of them (I'm sure they all wished the audience wasn't reminded of them or given their actual names) finally we get to the end and find that the cat who was name Duffy in the movie was actually named squeaky... I don't want to complain to much about this but if you're going to change the cats name.... why Duffy? Anyway there are a lot of problems with the movie.... it for instance could be a 1/3 the length and have a more coherent and easy to follow story. 2.... rules like "The cat can only have one conversation with the person are kind constricting... almost limiting anything interesting transpiring (actually after watching it it absolutely limits it here as nothing interesting happens) Another fun thing in the film is the fact that the movie goes out of its ways to show just how stupid the writers are... as they know about as much about computers, fine arts, theater, and Humphrey Bogart as an actual cat does... but in the actual cats defense, it doesn't care. This coupled with horrible background music, establishing shots they probably got from a selection of stock footage make for something so bizarre and uninteresting it need to be seen to be believed. I watched this movie and honestly I have no idea what in the world happened. I don't know who thought this movie needed to be made, but I'm glad they did... cause it beautifully illustrates almost every mistake one can make making a low budget direct to video movie.

From the director of such homoerotic thrillers as Leather Jacket Love Story, Beastly Boyz, and Body Blow comes the thrilling erotic adventures of a young confused transsexual teen and his lovable but ineptly schizophrenic father. There's also a talking cat. Set in an imaginary land far away where the white spruce lined mountains of Wisconsin are only a mere 5 minute walk from the white sandy beaches of Hawaii, A Talking Cat's impressive 3 establishing shots of creeks and bridge will leave you breathless. This wild adventure will take you through the intricate inner workings of unfinished logarithm data, a deeply troubled millionaire paranoid schizophrenic man-child, and delicious homemade cheese puffs.The undisputed high point of the movie is the deeply touching underage homoerotic swimming lesson cut tragically short in a dramatic confrontation by a mother unable to cope with her daughter's unfortunate combination of ambition, competence, and integrity. With a wonderfully crafted cell phone recorded/engineered voice-over cameo by Eric Roberts, this cinematic masterpiece is one the entire family can enjoy.

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.