As I write this, the Disney Movie Club will soon be ending its operations. By the time this piece goes live, that will have already happened. This was a service essentially based on the old Columbia House model: get a few titles for next to nothing, then be stuck having to buy titles at full price for what seems like forever. The rules were labyrinthine, so I never bothered. That was a shame, because they had many disc exclusives, such as The Watcher in the Woods, The Black Hole and The Black Cauldron.
I’m not surprised 1978’s The Cat from Outer Space wasn’t one of their titles on blu-ray. After all, there doesn’t seem to be much demand for most of the live-action Disney films from the 60s and 70s. I grew up watching many of those films, though I don’t have much recollection of them. But I love cats, and so I ended up buying a DVD of this film. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I’m glad I only paid as much for that disc as it would cost to rent one time, as I was sorely disappointed.
The premise has an alien cat stranded on Earth after his ship has to do an emergency landing. Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 is not an alien that looks like a cat, but an actual cat. Admittedly, he has some special powers, but those are only courtesy of the collar he wears. Through that, he has the ability of move objects with his mind, as well as communicate with humans by projecting his thoughts directly their minds. This is how he ropes Ken Berry into helping to repair his craft.
Perhaps the most helpful thing Berry does is he decides to call his newfound friend, “Jake”. Other than that, he is weirdly useless. He is the typical bumbling oaf that all male leads are in this kind of thing. But, given all the things Jake can do through his collar, I wondered why he needed a human’s assistance. Really, anything can use one of these devices, including humans, as demonstrated in a scene with Berry floating around the ship in an aircraft hangar.
Those humans are played almost exclusively by sitcom actors. I’m amazed by why anybody would have gone to the movies to pay to see people you could see at home on television. Berry is best known from Mama’s Family, though that was a couple of years in the future. Sandy Duncan is a fellow scientist and love interest.
Curiously, the film has Maclean Stevenson and Harry Morgan, both from M*A*S*H and where the latter had replaced the former. Stevenson looks and acts like he does in everything I’ve seen him in, as if he’s a Mad Magazine character drawn by Jack Davis come to life. Morgan’s sole characteristic here is his fetishistic obsession with a riding crop he’s always carrying. And yet, all I could think about throughout the runtime is I had just seen that actor getting between to death with a bronzed baby shoe in Appointment with Danger.
This is a film not only filled with sitcom actors, but which operates at about the mentality of such fare and with the same production values. It is complete inanity from beginning to end, almost all of which is staged on artlessly lit sets. This doesn’t even feel like a movie, but more like watching three consecutive episodes of a contemporaneous sitcom.
Even the special effects are far from special, relying heavily on reversed footage and freeze frames. There are some decent stunts in a sequence near the end involving Berry in an ancient biplane rescuing Duncan from a runaway helicopter. Unfortunately, I had lost almost all interest in the film by this point, and this did not reclaim my attention. Also, I could not suspend my disbelief enough to accept a pilot-less helicopter would just keep flying in a straight line. That is, of course, only until Duncan has been rescued, and then it spirals straight into the ground.
This is emblematic of the general problem the picture has with logic, even for a work aimed at young children. Much of the plot is driven by Jake’s need for a large quantity of gold to repair his ship. To get the money for the gold, Berry and Stevenson bet a large amount of money on three consecutive football games, knowing Jake can control the outcome. We know he can control events from that far away, because saw him doing that earlier, during a basketball game the men are watching on television.
During the first of those football games, Jake ends up tranquillized and so is unable to control the ball. What left me slack-jawed is nobody thinks to just take the magic necklace and control the outcome of those games themselves. Instead, these idiots, and Duncan, go to the pool hall of the bookie through whom the bet had been made, and use the necklace to have Duncan beat a pool shark in a game with ridiculous odds. And yet, they never thought to use it to just win the games they already had a bet on?
I’m still not sure what I expected from The Cat from Outer Space. The title character is cute, but today we have endless cat videos on the internet for free, meaning that isn’t much incentive to watch the film. I didn’t laugh once. I didn’t so much as chuckle once. I don’t think I even smiled at any time while watching this. This is a repulsively stupid film that can’t even be bothered to stick to its own logic. It’s an insult to its audience and, given that market was young children, that’s twice as offensive.
Dir: Norman Tokar
Starring Ken Berry, Sandy Duncan, Harry Morgan
Watched on Disney DVD