Baby Cat

This film will make you question your sanity.

Dana (played to perfection by Natalie Cotter) moves into her new apartment and adopts the neighborhood cat.

Except it's not an actual cat but a scantily clad young woman dressed as a cat.

Meanwhile, her job is a joke, she's broke and her love life is . . . Well, okay, her job is only a joke because her boss holds meetings with invisible employees and her co-worker doesn't try to explain it.

And then she falls in love with the cat. And it's hot sapphic passion at first but falls into the trap of ordinary couples--is there more to this relationship outside of sex? Does Lori, the cat , want to get married or have kids? The telegrams she mysteriously is able to send before having such a conversation tells very little about her feelings. But it does explain the goings on in the neighborhood.

Trust me.

There's also a drug war going on that Dana sees on the news and apparently some mysterious being is responsible for taking out the notorious drug cartels. I won't spoil that connection, but it did make me clamor for a big budget remake starring Amy Schumer and Anna Kendrick with stunt choreography by the John Wick team.

But Hollywood needs to keep their hands off this one. It's the low budget weirdness, down to the moving chroma key background that really makes this story work.

And props to a groundbreaking performance by Socks Whitmore as a transitioning non-binary person, played perfectly straight, no pun intended. Lisa London also shines as the mom.

This is the kind of film that Cinema Epoch had been known for in its inception from Mad Cowgirl to Blue Dream. Hope they keep it up!

First I have to give credit to Natalie Cotter (Dana) and Fawn Winters (Cat). They gave their all in their roles in perhaps one of the worst movies ever made. Dana moves to LA, and works writing reports for an oil company. As an example of how bad the script it, she is stated as making reports of where to dig for oil. Oil is drilled! The office is a total joke. There is a back story of drugs, using stereotypes of mob activity. It is thrown in at random. When she opens her door, there is clearly green screen to show a balcony, except the scene jumps all over the place, and the hues change. The color hues also change in various scenes, and at least one green screen isn't even properly placed for being background. There are even place cards for scenes that are part of the movie. Some of the inserted scenes defy any logic. There is a difference between low budget and shear incompetence. This is the latter. There are movies that are so bad they are good. This one is simply bad. The two actors gave their all in their roles, so I will recognize that, and give it two stars. They aren't responsible for the incompetence.

This movie came up randomly while watching Tubi and first I didn't like it but it held my attention. The rest of the day I kept thinking about it. The scenes between the protagonist and the cat were strangely touching so I am rewatching as I write. The actress impersonating the cat does such a good job. The weirdness is on par with David Lynch's strangeness without the all-consuming darkness and focuses on human connection instead. I like that the protagonists are female and queer and how the random misogyny at her awful job highlight the disconnect in her life.

What I don't like is that the score drowns out the dialog in a lot of scenes. And how long it took to reveal the connection between the parallel plot lines.

A woman falls in love with a female who acts and dresses like a cat??!!!

Let's break down how I got to 6 stars:

Special effects - 0 stars. I've never seen worse green screens.

Plot - 2 stars. It actually made more sense (which is saying absolutely nothing) as it went along

Actors - 8 stars. They owned their roles, no matter how outlandish they might be. And it takes a special kind of courage to:

A. Dress and act and "speak" like a cat for an entire movie

B. Pretend to fall in love with a person who dresses, acts, and "speaks" like a cat for an entire movie.

Honestly, I could have stopped 10 minutes in and not think I missed anything. But the longer I watched, the more I appreciated what they we're trying to do.

Also, extra stars for the Lisa London appearance.

That would be a better name. Because the final cut of this movie is so bad.

• They (probably the editor) zoomed very noticable in on de material in some shots. That's just not done. Because you lose your quality. As is seen in this movie. The zooming was done so bad, you'd think the editor accidently fell asleep on the keyboard en never noticed what he just did.

• Than the keying. Are there even application that don't have an instand key-effect in the effecten bin. (Drop on clip and select color.)

In one instance they open a door and there is something going in the shot wich could have easely been prevented by a simple mask.

• The most amateurish is the fact that the editor left a flash frame. Around the 17th minute.

• And never use a moving background when you a going to key a shot over that (moving) shot.

So why did I watch the whole thing and why the two stars?

The two main girls. They were great. In their own way.