Aloha yall,
Tex Hula
Every other Monday I watch a movie I've never heard of, or know anything about. Here's my latest:
FELIDAE (1994)
My piece of shit, meth-head neighbors had a less than one year old dog chained up in their front yard. Last Wednesday, I went to give him food and water again, because they had disappeared, leaving him without once again. When I got to him he was covered in ticks. The ticks were so bad I could see them on him from five feet away. He was also broken mentally. I decided to immediately terminate their dog owning privleges, and took him home. After a few days of massive tick picking parties, shampooing, love, attention, and milk-bones, he soon had a shiny coat and was acting like a rowdy pup again. My friend who has a farm, and three other dogs took him to his place yesterday evening. He'll be on a chain for a week to let him acclimate and know he has a good home. When the week is up the chain comes off for good, and he'll be a free-roaming farm dog. Anyways, point of this story is that's my week. That's where my head's at. I'm still furious at these "people" for there neglect and abuse of this dog. And man, I picked the wrong fucking movie to watch tonight.
FELIDAE is a German animated film based on a novel of the same name. Francis is a cat moving into a new neighborhood. His owner is a part-time archaeologist, full-time writer of "trash novels". As Francis gets accustomed to his new digs, he goes out to explore the backyard and discovers the corpse of a cat with it's throat slit. A one-eyed alley cat named Bluebeard steps in and explains to Francis that this is the fourth murder in the neighborhood. This scene had me confused. Bluebeard says the murder was caused by a can opener. Francis deduces that judging by the wound it couldn't possibly be done by a can opener and was obviously caused by cat claws. Naturally I thought they meant the murder weapon was a can opener. Do they realize how insanely difficult it would be to kill a cat with a can opener? You would get ripped to shreds trying. Slowly I realized "can opener" was a term they reffered to humans as. Also, why wasn't a dog the prime suspect? After watching the movie, I don't think that dogs exist in the FELIDAE world. They're never mentioned or seen once.
So Bluebeard begins introducing Francis around the neighborhood where he gets to meet some of the local cats. Like Kong, a hulked out cat that looks like a wolverine on steroids. When they first meet him, Kong thinks Bluebeard and Francis are a gay couple. (But honestly though, Francis and Bluebeard sound like names for a really fun gay couple.) Throughout the first act Kong shows up wanting to beat the piss out of Francis. At one point Kong reveals that he's actually the killer. But soon after, he discovers the mutilated body of his pregnant mate he recants his confession, and decides he's going to help them find the murderer. Which he doesn't do because he basically disappears from the movie. This was an interesting character, but what was his point? And what was the point of making him a red herring just for a few minutes?
He also meets a cat named Pascal who uses his rich owner's computer to keep a database on all the cats in the neighborhood, including a seperate database of all the murder victims. Years after the events of the movie, Pascal would use his owner's computer to write a glowing review of the CATS trailer under the name Bert Bolger.
At night while Francis' owner sleeps, Francis hears cat screams coming from the attic. He investigates and finds a cat cult of at least a hundred cats who worship a cat named Claudandus, who was tortured to death in his new house. The cult leader, Joker operates an electric reactor, while his followers take turns commiting suicide by throwing themselves into the electrical current. I'm a very heavy sleeper, but I don't think that I could sleep through a giant cat cult in my attic taking turns electrocuting themselves. So naturally, Joker becomes prime suspect number one. Later in the movie, while hunting for rats in the basement of this cat house of horrors, Francis plays a videotape of the house when it used to be a research lab. The tape shows a number of horrific experiments on cats. This would be hard to watch normally, but after the week I've just had it was especially difficult. The experiments in this movie are more graphic than the ones in THE PLAGUE DOGS. Throughought all of the testing, one cat stands out as a better test subject than the others, Claudandus.
During his investigation Frances determines that the victims were all having sex at their time of death. So not long after discovering this fact, a horny femme cat-ale shows up in his yard. And yes, we get a full on, cat on cat sex scene. Right after he discovers the murders happened while the cats were having sex. Actually, I have no room to judge Francis too harshly on this. After the scene ends we never see this female cat character in the movie again. The creepiest part of this scene is just knowing some perv has wanked it to this movie.
Eventually Francis uncovers a plot involving the ancient Egyptian cat deity, Felidae, and a plan to create a master race of cats to conquer the world. (Oh Germany. Will you ever learn?) Francis comes to some of his deductions not by following a series of clues, but by some giant leaps of logic. When we finally learn the identity of our main culprit, things just don't add up. At it's core Felidae is a mystery movie, and it's not a very good one.
But I would still recommend this movie just based on the animation alone. The film is gorgeous. This looks like an early Don Bluth production. Instead of ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN, this is All Cats Go Through Hell. Throughout the movie Francis has a number of nightmare sequences. These are some of my favorite rewind and re-watch moments. One involves a giant priest with thousands of cat corpses he's marionetting and swaying back and forth in front of Francis.
But be warned: this movie may look like a Don Bluth cartoon, but it contains extremely gory scenes involving animals. "This doesn't look like a scene from THE ARISTOCATS." That's an actual line from Francis in the movie. Yeah, no shit cat Sherlock.
Mahalo pardners,
Tex Hula
