When the first trailer for the allegedly long-awaited film adaptation of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical phenomenon Cats was released in July of 2019, it became a viral sensation for all the wrong reasons. People were horrified at the CGI cat-human chimeras, and reveled in forcing the horrifying sights on their friends, family, and followers. (At this writing, the official YouTube upload of that first trailer had over sixteen million views). Any naive hope that this horror could turn to curiosity, ideally by desperately crowding in theaters to see just WTF that trailer was all about, was immediately crushed by the hilarious and hubristic decision to schedule release opposite one of the most anticipated movies of the decade, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. On December 20th, 2019, Cats premiered in theaters to a deluge of negative reviews and suffered a historically abysmal opening weekend box office. Both critics and audiences insisted the film was too “plotless,” the cats too strange looking, and the whole thing “too horny.”

I was staying with family in Dallas the weekend Cats was released. My brother-in-law and I, like the majority of sentient beings on the planet, decided to go see the new Star Wars movie to kill a lazy holiday afternoon. I rolled my eyes through two-and-a-half hours of incoherent noise before leaving the theater annoyed at having paid money for what felt like an unfinished assembly cut. That whole day my mind couldn’t stop picking at all the film’s abandoned plot threads, and I became angrier and angrier at the lazy storytelling (The Emperor’s back! He’s uh… he’s just been hiding… over there!), the nonsensical macguffins and endless side quests. I must have looked crazy ranting to my sister, prompting her to suggest that she and I go see another movie as a palate cleanser. Which is why the next day, she, our mother, and myself parked ourselves in the best seats in a large, empty auditorium and ordered a few very large drinks. Before the lights went down a family of four sat in the row behind us. In a theater built for over one hundred, the seven of us would be the only audience for this opening weekend screening of Tom Hooper’s Cats.

My family and I waiting to see Cats in theaters (*Dramatic reenactment)

Academy Award winning director Tom Hooper has proven he’s not afraid to make choices, as well as not care how unmotivated or mystifying or inscrutable those choices may be. For his previous film, also based on an ‘80s Broadway mega-hit, Les Miserables, Hooper decided the whole thing would be shot in extreme, unsettling close-ups with the characters singing directly at the camera lens. It was intended to convey just how sad and intense the character’s emotions are, but instead just came off as unsettling and off-putting the longer the (very long) film went on. These decisions were baffling, disappointing to fans of the stage production, and left audiences somewhere on a scale of enraged to meh. However, it did manage to turn a profit, garnering a bunch of award nominations and even a few wins.

Surely, if the man did it with one musical sensation he could do the same thing with another one, right? Even with his penchant for leaning into his most bizarre choices. Right?

The movie was everything I had been promised. Baffling in every aspect, often terrifying to behold, and, yes, very, strangely, inexplicably horny. As the credits started my sister looked at me wearing a look of bewilderment that clashed with the leopard print cardigan she wore to “get in the spirit of things” and asked, “What’d you think?” with a tone more desperate than curious. I smiled, looked her in the eye, and said, “I will be watching this movie the rest of my life.”

As a connoisseur of cult cinema, I knew a new crap-classic when I saw it. I told my sister: “Give it six months to a year and there will be sold out late-night Cats screenings with everyone wearing cat ears and singing along.” I was wrong. It only took about three weeks.

On January 13th, Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse, a theater that hadn’t even carried the movie on its opening weekend, posted this tweet:

Tickets were released for screenings that weekend. Since I hadn’t stopped raving about the bizarre sights this film had shown me since returning home to New York, my girlfriend was equally excited to see this embarrassment. I got us tickets and the two of us made our way downtown for the first Alamo “Rowdy Screening” of Cats. It was like witnessing a prophecy fulfilled. There they were: a packed theater of people in cat ears and faded Broadway t-shirts laughing, eagerly waiting for the lights to dim and the movie to start. The screenings that first weekend sold out so quickly, Alamo added more for the next, and then more after that. Starting the weekend of January 25th, Cats screenings were a part of every weekend until mid-March, when the theater was forced to close by the COVID-19 outbreak. True Cats fanatics who attended five or more rowdy screenings were inducted into the Rowdy Cats Club and given a special pin to commemorate the accomplishment. (Yes, I am a member of the Rowdy Cats Club. Yes, I have this pin.) Before the closure, weekend Cats screenings were being held in the Drafthouse’s largest theater.

How the hell did this happen?

Yes, I am a member of the Rowdy Cats Club. Yes, I have this pin.

The experience of seeing Cats, especially at a late-night or rowdy screening, is like trying to solve a brain-teaser in a karaoke bar on a rollercoaster. The film’s most impressive feat is the way it keeps your mind constantly engaged as you’re repeatedly subjected to new and unexpected bafflements you can never quite be prepared for.

Before we go too far, I think it’s important to say that the many faults in this movie have nothing to do with the various SFX artists who were given the unenviable task of bringing these unholy cat/human monsters birthed from nightmare on an impossible deadline. Blame those who instructed these many talented artists to use their skills in order to bring these particular horrors to life. To even make a guess at why we ended up with such horrifying creatures as our cast of characters in what was intended to be an Oscar-bait, family, musical-comedy, we have to wade down through layers of bewildering decisions. So, please, indulge me as I try to answer the most basic of these questions as best I can:

Question: Why use CGI? Why not just put the actors in cat costumes like they do in the stage show?

Best Answer I Can Come Up With: Well, the stage show was successful because it was a spectacle. What better way to recreate that on screen than with some SFX achievement like “Digital Fur Technology.”

Okay, but then why not use CGI to make them look like cats? Why CGI them to look like they’re in an uncanny valley version of the play?

BAICCUW: Uhhhh… well, if they don’t look like the cats in the stage version, audiences may not immediately make the connection that this is a film version of that play they saw on vacation in 1988.

From there we are left to wonder why most cats are naked, but some are wearing clothes, and why some start off wearing clothes and then gradually become naked. At that point you’re so numb to it that it’s fine, but then one cat takes off their clothes and it’s inexplicably very, very, not fine (much more on that in a moment). We never know exactly how big these cats are meant to be since maintaining a consistent scale isn’t something this movie ever gets a grasp on. The cats are portrayed as being somewhat, sorta, generally cat-ish sized, but when we see mice and cockroaches (horrible, awful, nightmare inducing, mice and cockroaches) they are roughly the same size that mice or cockroaches would be to a human. In end, it’s best to shrug your shoulders, roll your eyes, and just move on because this film’s issues are so much bigger than any of this.

Maintaining a consistent scale isn’t something this movie ever gets a grasp on.

How does one take a book of unrelated poems and string them together to make the illusion of a plot?

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, being the master storyteller he is, knew it was best just to keep things simple. He arranged his songs to suggest the tale of a bunch of cats competing to be chosen for the right to be the human--err--kitty-cat sacrifice in a feline death cult. Y’know, instead of trying something more complicated like, I don’t know, cats trying to get adopted? Regardless, the story of the Cats stage show is one that is more implied than told; the show has long been described as being a plotless series of vignettes rather than a full and proper story. So the challenge for Tom Hooper and co-screenwriter Lee Hall was how to make this plotless play into a traditional Hollywood Award Season contender without changing things too much–lest they incur the wrath of Cats purists (namely Sir Andrew).

Their solution?

Try and destroy Idris Elba’s career. Also adding a few brief incidental moments of dialogue to better set up or contextualize certain songs before they begin. Actually, the biggest changes to the stage show come down to two choices that both actually make a lot of sense in theory.

First, they took the white ballet dancer cat, that only the nerdiest of Broadway nerds knew was named Victoria, and transformed her into an audience insert character. During the overture, we see Victoria abandoned and then discovered by the Jellicle cats; pretty basic setup, having a character who, like the audience, has no idea what’s going on, thus making it okay to have all the other characters speak exclusively in exposition. The problem here, like in most self-insert fanfics, is that because she’s supposed to be our “protagonist” Victoria suddenly has to be featured time and time again in moments that have nothing to do with her. Everyone is far too concerned with the new girl’s comings and goings. “Where have you been?” Munkustrap demands after this cat he’s known for about an hour vanished for five minutes. Everyone is also way too eager to get her opinion on things she only just learned about. One of the most repeated riffs heard during the rowdy screenings is “Victoria doesn’t even go here!” in these moments. For the rest of the runtime Victoria’s job is to stare wide-eyed, mouth slightly agape, at whatever cat is singing at the moment. It’s almost impressive how a character with so much screen time manages to reach the end of the movie without a single distinguishing characteristic besides “the new girl.”

The worst moment of Victoria’s forced inclusion is, of course, the equally forced and out of place inclusion of her song “Beautiful Ghosts (Victoria’s Song).” Written by Taylor Swift specifically to qualify for a “Best Original Song” Academy Award nomination and potentially earn T-Swift the “O” in her probably inevitable EGOT, the song immediately follows the first performance of “Memory”–you know, the most famous song in the entire show. The song that heart-breakingly deals with the passage of time, the loss of youth, the realization that all the best moments in your life are the ones you’ve already lived. Well “Beautiful Ghosts” follows that up with, “Oh yeah! At least you have memories!” which is such a bafflingly misguided emotion for the character (Victoria is barely older than a kitten, she has her whole Jellicle life and an army of new rather easily made friends), let alone misguided for the moment (I mean… READ THE FREAKIN’ ROOM). Worst of all, it’s just a boring nothing of a song the movie reprises again and again to try and convince you that it, like the cat it was written for, belongs.

Oh! Well I never was there ever a cat so clever as magical mister Mistoffelees

The other change to the stage show, as I alluded to earlier, involves Idris Elba as the mischievous, evil, warlock(?), Macavity. In the stage show, Macavity is referenced a few times before being introduced fairly late into the proceedings; he kidnaps the Jellicle leader, Old Deuteronomy, then comes back disguised as Old Deuteronomy for… some reason, gets immediately discovered, has a fight with Munkustrap, loses, the end. It’s a very odd and abrupt subplot, but then Cats is a very odd and abrupt show. In the movie, Hooper and Hall felt expanding Macavity was the key to finally getting an Academy approved amount of plot into the show. Their villain cat is a Jellicle pariah, living with the other outcast cats (outcats?) on a barge in the Thames and is obsessed with becoming the Jellicle Choice. Throughout the film, after each cat sings “the song of themselves” and auditions to be the chosen one, Macavity arrives and apparates the other competitors onto the barge where they are held captive. The plan works and Macavity presumes he will be the Jellicle Choice by default as the only remaining competitor, but Old Deuteronomy isn’t about to send her worst enemy off to his death (for some reason?), and refuses him.

Now some of you read the above and have really honed in on that word “apparates” I just casually tossed in there with no explanation. Or perhaps it was the word “warlock,” a little earlier? Yeah, you see, Hooper and Hall also decided to just casually give a few of the cats in the movie superpowers. Macavity can teleport himself and others all around London like he’s Nightcrawler from the X-Men (until the end of the movie where he inexplicably can’t). Worst of all, they decided to give Macavity a parting line of dialogue everytime he vanishes himself, usually a complete non sequitur, “Ineffable!” *vanish*, “Macavityyyyyyyy!” *vanish*, and, yes, in one of the movie’s great though probably not intentional gags, “MEOW!” *vanish*.

Ironically, Elba’s greatest humiliation comes at the moment of Macavity’s great triumph. With all the entrants for the Jellicle Choice tied up on Macavity’s barge, Bombalurina (Taylor Swift), interrupts the Jellicle Ball under the Jellicle Moon to drug the other Jellicle Cats with (Jellicle?) catnip and sing a song of the wicked wonderfulness of Macavity. At the song’s climax, Macavity himself arrives, but this time Elba’s character–who up until now has been wearing a wide fedora hat and long coat–is no longer wearing anything at all. Macavity appears suddenly, indecently, naked. And, for reasons I’ve been unable to discern despite many, many, conversations on the subject it looks wrooooooong.

Now, at this point we’re about ninety minutes into the film and we’ve been staring at a combination of naked cats, clothed cats, and clothed cats stripping down to become naked cats the entire time, but for some reason Macavity’s sudden nudity is the step too far. The sight is shocking when the character apparates onto the scene, waving his discarded hat in the air as if to emphasize how deliberate this nakedness for some reason is.

Adapting Cats for the big screen was never going to be an easy task (no less a talent than Tony Award winning playwright Tom Stoppard once tried and was dissatisfied with the results), and I totally get why “insert a POV character” and “beef up the villain” were pretty obvious places to start. But, ultimately, while sensible in concept, the execution of Hooper and Hall’s plot elements just raise way more questions than they answer and create more problems than they solve. Idris Elba is a popular and beloved actor so I’m sure his career will be fine, though the naked image of Macavity will probably follow him forever. Francesca Hayward will probably not so easily escape Victoria at least in Hollywood’s eyes, which is a shame. Is it too late to forgo abandoned ballerina ingenues and naked kitty-cat sorcerers all seeking ritual sacrifice and reincarnation and just make this a story about cats up for adoption?

Of course, the biggest question is why on earth have I watched this horror show six (Update: seven…) times! Well, what I said above is true, the experience of watching Cats is like trying to solve a brain-teaser in a karaoke bar on a rollercoaster, and I happen to like brain-teasers, karaoke, and rollercoasters. Sure, all three at once can be a bit… much, but if you take the film on its terms the perplexing choices, the catchy music, and the whiplash inducing tonal shifts, can all blend into a captivating and if nothing else unique experience. It’s actually great to watch this movie with someone seeing it for the first time, getting to vicariously relive the dumbfounded wonder as the movie manages to start off strange and consistently get stranger all the way through to its “Why are we still here?” protracted epilogue. The performances, especially by the less big name actors, are giving all they have and of course the music is legitimately fun and catchy. The dance sequences are well done even if the dancer’s CGI’d cat feet never really look like they’re touching the floor. I’d even argue that the movie’s lack of plot actually makes it easier to rewatch. There’s no second-act padding to wade through, no phoned-in “meet cutes” from the screenwriter’s cliche handbook. For both better and worse from start to finish Cats is just Cats and you’ll never see anything else quite like whatever the hell Cats actually is.

The late-night rowdy screenings at Alamo Drafthouse and other theaters are also just a great time! This is the movie as it needs to be experienced, with a large enthusiastic (and slightly intoxicated) crowd ready to hiss at Macavity (and the film’s other greatest villain, James Cordon), sway their arms in the air to the chorus of “Mister Mistoffelees,” scream in teenybopper hysteria at the appearance of Skimbleshanks (He’s the best boy and he deserves better! He took off work for this!), and to shout “Hands!” at every unfinished effects shot. (Since I’m writing this in a time of social distancing I’ll also add that watching your friends watch this movie over FaceTime or Zoom is equally a thrill.)

So yeah, last December I saw two really bad movies in one weekend. One was so worried about reminding you of a better movie we’ve all already seen that it negated the need for its own existence. The other refused to be confined by the limitations of what “makes any sense whatsoever” and swung for the fences so hard they knocked themselves unconscious. And in the end it's that audacity to be different that keeps me coming back.

Now, if anyone has any ideas on how we can convince Universal to spend $250 million on a Starlight Express movie directed by Michael Bay…