She's Allergic to Cats

A trippy comedy for weirdos. Loved it. Unlike anything else I've seen. Funny and twisted the film is populated with memorable characters and a signature glitch art aesthetic. Highly recommended.

"Michael, you are a dirty boy. You are just a giant, sad, dirty man-baby."

-- Sebastian, producer and agent from L. A.'s underbelly

To this day I still get the business for making my friends watch Adam Rifkin's The Dark Backward. I'll never live down the "movie with the arm coming out of Judd Nelson's back." I'm the guy who walks out of a movie theatre after a showing of David Cronenberg's Videodrome, only to have my date tell me, "you pick the worst movies." Chicks.

So I can imagine your reaction when I show you this teaser that opens with bananas falling on a man's head . . . Alongside images of cats . . . And a voiceover about a naked duck lady with duck boobs . . .

. . . and there's a cat carrier in flames . . . And 1976-era John Travolta from The Boy in the Plastic Bubble keeps showing up, with musical backing by the obscure, late '70s teen-pop duo sounds of Donnie and Joe Emerson and the new wave synth-pop drone of Cowboys International. And the fact that I can't recall any other film that, through ambient sounds and jerky-visual collages, reaches out of the screen like a J-Horror yurei and induces an uneasy queasiness.

Yeah, this is going to be one weird movie. Not as weird as Under the Silverlake. Well, maybe weirder than that indie oddball I love. . . .

Like David Lynch experimental and Andy Warhol avant-garde (bananas?). Like Jim Jarmusch '80s indie-expressionistic. Like a John Waters Pink Flamingos joint. Like MTV Liquid Television-retro crossed with a USA Night Flight analog bong-hit and a snort of Takashi Miike's scent for the bizarre (The Happiness of the Katakuris or Visitor Q, anyone?). And that means music video director Michael Reich's (Ryan Adams, Bad Religion, and My Chemical Romance) feature film debut will be an intelligent cult classic that only a film freak like me will love-and mainstream flick lubbers who pine for Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club, will hate.

I'm all in, kittie cat.

For we are in a land-world somewhere Under the Silver Lake, a movie that, like Sam, the boss at B&S says, ". . . Unlike the vast majority of the world," we loved. And like that Andrew Garfield starrer, She's Allergic to Cats is impossible to spoil and difficult to explain. But I'll sure as hell try-and my critical attempt to make sense of it won't spoil one frame of it for you.

Mike Pinkney (played by meta-Mike Pinkney, who's Michael Reich 2.0) is another one of those aspiring, emo-nerdy filmmakers who arrives in Tinseltown-and is rejected by the industry. Yeah, pitching an all-talking cat version of Stephen King's Carrie . . . And embracing '80s analog technology in your work . . . Has a way of stymieing a career. So he has to settle for a job as animal groomer-but not of cats, but of dogs. And he sucks at his job because, well, he hates his job. And cats.

And he hates his dick of a German agent, Sebastian (the funny-as-hell Flula Borg; he'll appear as "Javelin" in James Gunn's upcoming Suicide Squad). And he hates the down-and-out club musician landlord of his rat-infested rental home. But Mike loves his endless tapes of retro '80s video art that nobody wants to watch. Yeah, videos of falling bananas and dancing cats have that effect on people.

And by way of his dog-grooming gig, he meets his femme fatale, Cora. And she looks like Nastassja Kinski-because she the real-life daughter (Sonja Kinski) of Nastassja-who starred in Paul Schrader's Cat People (1982). And Cora hates cats. And she takes Mike on a quasi-horror, acid-trip rom-com that goes meta-film noir -- if there is such a genre. If not, Michael Reich just created it.

Micheal Reich is the type of director that perks up you ears and inspires you to follow his career, with interest.

So I really had a fun time with this, the lead actor was very cute charming and sympathetic and it was just the kind of weird that I tend to go for, but it seemed a bit aimless and kind of unfinished by the end, I mean there was no real punch or payoff that I could see, Just a slow and very strange and still by the end of the movie burgeoning disintegration of a poor average schmoe's life who was only trying to make it in Hollywoodland doing a bit of a gross demeaning job and living in a s&&thole apartment with an unnerving rat infestation that his landlord was rather useless at fixing for him, and then his first date in a long time dies on him after a very strange night all because she happened to be...well, you know! I fail to see what exactly made this a horror movie, it felt like the story was heading that way and that the guy was kind of starting to lose it, but nobody was murdered and it didn't even have any blood in it, it was just about his problems and personal inadequacies and how his rat problem and love life brutally came crashing together to the poor odd girl's cost. I loved the very garbled old vhs-esc distortions that run throughput the movie, they really gave it a certain flair And added kick, I loved all that stuff, very cool. I don't know had a great little time just chilling out to this movie really and I liked it a lot for it's highly effective weird edgy ambiance and dark indie movie charm. Somewhat dark but not really a horror movie at all in my book, but very enjoyable for a certain kind of mindset nevertheless, definitely worth the time to watch if you like that slow descent into the whirlpool of modern alienation madness kind of movies, you've been warned though, it's a weird one! 🐈 🐀 💀 x.

Michael Pinkney (playing himself) is a man struggling with his lower income lifestyle in the shadow of the film industry. His job is degrading, his home is infested with rats and his mind constantly wanders into a lo-fi dreamscape that mirrors his analog video experiments.

"She's Allergic to Cats" comes to us from writer-director Michael Reich, who previously co-directed "Video Town" with star Pinkney. We also have Sonja Kinski ("Holidays") as the romantic lead, as much as this film can be said to have much romance. The name that actually jumped out at me, though, was executive producer Andrew van den Houten. As a huge fan of his film "Headspace", I was excited to see something he was attached to.

Trying to describe this film is a bit of a challenge. On some levels, it is pretty straightforward – a pet groomer who meets a young woman and is trying to advance his relationship with her. But the overall weirdness permeates the film. Situations abound concerning rats, bananas, rats that eat bananas, and close-up shots of dogs getting their genitals washed. Other situations are normal except that the people involved could be fresh out of Richard Linklater's "Slacker", such as a man who only watches movies with talking animals.

"Cats" made the rounds at Fantasia in 2016, receiving mixed-to-positive reviews. I missed it at that time, but luckily was able to catch it at the 2017 Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF). Although this is a hard film to market, and probably has no wide-release potential, it should not be easily disregarded. The video experiments alone show a strong skill and artistic vision utilizing the VHS aesthetic, something that has been coming back lately with "Lake Nowhere" and the folks at Everything is Terrible. In fact, if plans do not already exist to do so, this seems like the sort of film that would be perfect to release on VHS rather than DVD… if only they still made VCRs to play it.