A Brilliant Conflict

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

I recently purchased this emotional journey on DVD. It arrived in the post a couple of days ago, and tonight I sat down with my family to watch what wonders dreams are made of. I was not disappointed. Within five minutes my mother turned to me, and said calmly, "Don't buy anymore DVDs". My sister was quite emphatic throughout about her feelings. She begged me to turn it off, but I did not. She soon changed her tune when the two young men began to develop a special bond in the swimming pool. We watched on in awe. Emotions ran high. We laughed, we cried. By the end, I was sure something felt familar. The location, the level of quality, the Eric Roberts. It turns out this was made by the same people as 2014's biggest blockbuster Bigfoot Versus D.B.Cooper. Well done guys, lightning does strike twice!

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.

The opening scene and the 1st few minutes of getting used to the voice over feel awkward but just wait. The film becomes MUCH better and somehow the voice begins to fit the cat's personality. So cute. It left me feeling happy at the end. I wasn't bored and it is a great story for kids but I really enjoyed it too. Rare find for a G rating film.I am so glad that they went with real people and a real cat instead of computer animation like most kids films because that is what makes this movie so special. I also REALLY enjoyed not having to suffer through random song breaks throughout the movie. Most kids films are spent with characters singing songs that are so horrible it is embarrassing to have the volume on.---------------------------- ANDThis is for the negative reviewers that are complaining about the actors in this film having been in pornographic films in their past. 1. You seem to have enjoyed those past films enough to watch them and recognize the people in them. Before you judge them like they are sick perverts, look in the mirror because you have been watching their porn. I had no idea who either of them were and neither will your kids.2. Why does the actor's past bother you? It is completely irrelevant. Whether or not you enjoyed their pornos has nothing to do with rating this movie. I say good for both of them for trying to break away from that. It makes me sad that people are so negative about them trying to better themselves.

No, the title is not a joke. I literally fell asleep. I wish I was joking here. It has never happened to me before, not even when I was a little kid, but it happened; I fell asleep. This movie is so boring, it has absolutely nothing going for it. The mouth animation that shows us the cat is speaking is dumb, because it only shows us... a moving mouth that is black inside with no tongue, teeth or anything. I'm serious here. I could literally do better than that and I am very bad in movie editing.The constant reuse of scenes and music is horrendous We see some exact same scenes be used a dozen times throughout the story, even the movements of characters like the cat! And the pacing is awful. A third of the entire screen time is just the movie setting up a scene. There is even a scene where the fat guy drives with his car which takes a minute for him to get to his destination with nothing happening! (That's the part where I fell asleep by the way) The long scenes with very little development also really don't help here. The movie could've been 15 minutes and still have the exact same story.And the constant noise of the same cheery music, even while that doesn't fit the tone most of the time doesn't work either.And the story? It is all based around one gimmick; a cat that can talk once to a person and that cat uses that to help those around him. Now this can be amazing, but we got absolutely nothing. We don't even see the cat do things, like poking people to get them to do something. The only thing he did was hanging around here and there and then give a few half-assed hints. Some didn't even make sense, like the girl having to look on her computer that suddenly showed an article that would help her out, even though the cat remarked he doesn't understand anything of computers and we didn't see him open that page. What?And other than that, the story got nothing going for it. The characters are one-dimensional, they almost only use clichéd lines, there are no jokes and even entire plot threads get forgotten; for instance, in one plot thread there is this girl who wants to go to college because she is smart and good at programming but her mother is too poor. But then the mother gets something that potentially would make them rich enough to move to a bigger house... but not to spend it on her daughter's college. The daughter doesn't even remark it. She never even tell about it anymore. It was just dropped and forgotten, even after the rich guy offered her a job and thus could potentially pay for her studies. On a side note, even the programming stuff didn't make any sense. First she said she made a source engine. Okay, cool. But later the rich guy said that the girl made an application. Uh... there is a difference between a source engine and an application, they're not entirely the same... at all. Great. And programming is normally done through iteration. She could probably only test on her own wardrobe, so it is very unlikely that it would work anywhere else so iteration by testing with dozens if not hundreds of wardrobes is necessary. But nope, not even the genius programmers cannot think of that.And the conclusion of the story? Don't worry kids, your parents remarrying isn't a big deal. O, and that cat without owners is staying and not leaving... because. Heh, maybe those Abrams-flares really did manipulate him.In short; stay away from this thing. It will only hurt you and damage your brain.