In addition to the usual reviews and comments you would find on a horror movie blog, this is also a document of the wonderfully vast horror movie section of the video store I worked at in my youth.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Cat Vs Shark!

Last Saturday, I held an event at my place that was a year in the making. I shuttled in a chosen few to my neck of the woods for a diabolical double bill of Greydon Clark's Uninvited aka Cat On A Cruise Ship and Shark In Venice.


First up, was the flick everyone had been waiting for since we first laid eyes on the poster at the Fan Expo in 2009 and, by God was it worth the wait!

Probably the biggest relief about Uninvited was that the YouTube clip bandied about among my friends for the last year was not the only sidesplitting part of the movie. It was chock full of eighties goodness with happy-go-lucky beach bums partying down to a bippity-bop score of pop synth & drum machines. All this while lecherous villain Alex Cord (who was kind of like a poor man's Tom Selleck) tried to snuggle up to the girls and crusty old gangster George Kennedy looked on disapprovingly. And the clothes! I remember them being bad in that decade, but these two girls take it to a whole other level.

Dressed for success!

Jay, you say, this movie sounds fantastic already, how does a cat get on board and wreak havoc? Well, therein lies what had us all on the edge of our seat. You see this was not only a cat, but a lab experiment mutant/muppet inside of a cat, hence this cover.


And damn if that cat wasn't the best ventriloquist you've ever seen. It meowed incessantly, even when its mouth wasn't moving! Within the first few minutes, there was talk among us of a drinking game where we imbibed when the cat meowed, but it was quickly abandoned when we realized said game would have sent us all to the ER by the third act. This cat also had a poisonous bite, which caused your veins to burst almost instantaneously. The effect kind of looked like the chest-bursting scene from Alien, but without the budget to follow through on the actual bursting part. Perhaps the best bit of the movie was the climax though. It was like Titanic, except with a model boat shot in a bathtub.

Uninvited delivered the cheesy goods, which is more than I can say for the second part of our double bill.


Shark In Venice was unfortunately a bit of a letdown. How is that possible, you say? It has action! It has intrigue! It has Stephen Baldwin!

Yes, it has all those things, but somehow it still managed to underwhelm. This movie makes Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus look like Jaws. Of course, my crew and I did have some fun discussing Baldwin's unflattering wardrobe choices and his unexplained ability to respawn limbs, but for the most part there was too much tell and not enough show.

This is Stephen Baldwin's leg. Apparently.

My biggest disappointment with this movie, and I can't believe I'm going to say this, was the lack of CG. I was expecting to be regaled by hilariously bad renderings of sharks attacking gondolas (there is one scene, but it is over too quickly), but all we really get is a lot of stock footage from the Discovery Channel. They must've blown their budget on that one expositional flashback to a battle during The Crusades.

Someone's been watching Shark Week.

Despite one of our party insisting we turn off the movie and play video games instead, we powered through it, if only to see if Stephen Baldwin's erect nipples would indeed save the day.

So, clearly the unanimous victor of Cat Vs Shark was...


Now, how the hell am I going to top that?

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