Hell's Kitty is being marketed
as a horror/comedy, but a better way to look at it is as a sitcom for
horror fans. It has plenty of horror imagery, in-jokes for those who
love the genre, and an impressive list of cameos by scream queens and
kings including Adrienne Barbeau, Michael Berryman, and Oscar-darling
fish-man Doug Jones. But it is also a very goofy tale whose brand of
slapstick and slacker banter has its roots in the comedies of Kevin
Smith, and especially the Clerks and Mallrats vein of
underachieving twentysomething dudes and their dubious misadventures.
In that sense, its closest analog is Adam Green and Joe Lynch's
series Holliston, which likewise filters the standard sitcom
formula through the lens of the horror movie nerd, and likewise stars
the filmmakers as characters with their own names, alongside a
revolving door of unexpected big-name (within the world of cult
filmdom) cameos. In this case, the writer/director/actor playing
himself at the center of Hell's Kitty is Nicholas Tana, and
the film is the final iteration of a concept he has been working on
in various forms over the last few years. It originated as a web
series, for which Tana released 17 episodes with a respectable level
of success between 2011 and 2015, and then was reworked as a web
comic adaptation thereof. Now the project has morphed into a feature
film, which is seeing it get its widest release yet.
And I do mean it when I say that the
project has morphed into a film: this isn't exactly a new movie, but
rather the web series re-edited into feature format, with a
newly-shot wraparound device bridging the material. There's nothing
really wrong with this: it's actually a pretty effective way to bring
the series to a larger audience, as a single film might have legs on
streaming services and DVD/blu-ray which a series of
five-to-ten-minute episodes might not. I certainly had never heard of
Hell's Kitty as a web series, and I'm pretty squarely in the
target audience of a horror/comedy about cats, so that may be proof
that Tana retooling his series into a film was a good marketing idea.
But this also explains why it feels much more like a marathonned
season of a sitcom than an actual film, which is probably its biggest
shortcoming: it is unmistakably episodic, with many chunks feeling
fairly unrelated to those surrounding them, with the passage of four
years looking pretty obvious across the story's duration, and with
the wraparound segments feeling pretty transparently like new
material that solely exists to stitch together existing content. As a
film, it doesn't quite cohere. But if watched as a marathon of a
series in film form it is pretty entertaining – although still a
very uneven (and very low-budget) series which, it must be said, is
not as funny or as well-executed in its genre-blending as the
conceptually-similar Holliston.
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| You can only chase the red dot without catching it for so long before you snap. |
Nick loves his cat,
Angel, but she's destroying his love life: any time he brings a date
home, Angel gets jealous and territorial and lashes out at her. But
lately things are going way beyond just aggressive cat behavior:
Nick's dates are being horribly maimed by Angel's claws, and pretty
soon his kitty actually has a body count. You see, Angel is possessed
by some sort of demon who loves shedding blood and causing chaos,
even if she's still adorable and affectionate when only Nick is
around. Over the 17-episodes-turned-95-minute-feature, Nick and his
slacker buddy Adam try to figure out what to do about their literal
Cat From Hell problem, while having run-ins with various odd
characters who threaten to escalate the feline crisis (most of whom
are played by 80s horror stars in brief, often in-jokey, episodic
cameos). At its core, the concept is a clever one, and when the humor
deals most directly with the central problem of the possessed kitty
(which is to say, when it is most firmly in horror-parody territory)
it can be quite funny. Its Exorcist parody sequence is pretty
hilarious, as are any scenes in which the cat actor (Tana's actual
cat, Angel, who is playing a fictionalized version of herself just as
Nick and Adam are) is tasked with viciously attacking people. She's a
cat, so I can only imagine that trying to get her to act out scripted
scenes was incredibly difficult: surely much catnip or laser pointers
were involved, and I must guess that many attack scenes were shot by
Nick tossing the cat onto the "victim" from off-camera and
trying to capture Angel's authentic grumpy bewilderment. This is when
the series works best, and most lives up to the promise of its
endearingly goofy premise. The musical score – an Amityville
Horror or Children of the Corn-style arrangement of creepy
choral voices, except the voices are meows – is also really funny.
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"Wait, you mean we're not gonna
play hockey on the roof?" |
The problem with
the movie/series is that too much of it gets caught up in the
sub-Kevin-Smith horny-slacker-buddies humor which the plot is fleshed
out with. Most of the situations which set up feline disasters are
standard low-brow sitcom "awkward guy gets into an awkward
situation with a hot girl, either through his own awkwardness or
through the manipulation of his entertainingly douchy friend"
tropes. In the hands of a writer as witty and clever as Kevin Smith,
these decades-overplayed set-ups can still yield some pretty
hilarious material, but Tana is no Smith, and the situations often
end up feeling tired, played out, and reheated from an unexceptional
'90s sex-comedy. It doesn't help that Nick and Adam have the exact
same archetypal '90s-slacker-buddies friendship chemistry as Dante
and Randall from Clerks or TS and Brodie from Mallrats:
Nick is the exasperated, put-upon, frustratingly passive one whose
relationships are a mess, and Adam is the snarky, wacky "free
spirit" who is a total dick, but in a silly way that makes it
seem not so bad. It all seems way too familiar and too tropey: we've
seen it before, and we've seen it done better. Adam Green and Joe
Lynch's Holliston sometimes struggles to overcome the same
problems, but it largely succeeds on the strength of its clever and
genuinely hilarious blend of horror movie geekdom into its sitcom
tropes, which takes it into fresher territory; Hell's Kitty
needed to lean more heavily on its demonic feline plot, and use the
too-familiar dude buddy comedy a bit less. The cameos help spice
things up and move things in this direction, but some of them are too
short and arbitrary for their own good; I know this was a low-budget
web series and they probably couldn't afford somebody like Michael
Berryman for more than a day (if that), but they needed to give some
of these people a bit more to do, and give their cameos a bit more
room to breathe. They're fun while they last, and horror fans will
really appreciate the ways in which some of their cameos parody their
best-known roles, but they don't last lost enough.
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"Well, at least this is no less dignified than some
of the stuff they made me do in The Guyver." |
Overall, Hell's
Kitty is an intermittently fun but not quite successful attempt
at blending horror/comedy and sitcom formats. Tana certainly has a
good concept that he sometimes comes close to realizing, but his
execution doesn't quite work, and he too often sidelines the stronger
point of his concept in favor of too-well-worn sex-comedy tropes.
When Angel takes center stage as the titular evil kitty, she steals
the show, makes for some funny sequences, and gives us delightfully
bizarre scenes of the horror icons of our youth acting opposite a
house cat. But when the focus shifts towards Nick's various ill-fated
romantic subplots, it falls flat more often than not. That it feels
much more like a marathon of a web series than an actual film isn't a
problem, but what is a problem is that it was just an OK web series
to begin with. It's probably worth a look if you're a fan of this
particular sort of niche horror-nerd-sitcom - but the cat's pajamas
it unfortunately is not.
Score:
- Christopher S.
Jordan
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