by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The two films shown last night at the monthly Mars Movie
Screening in Golden Hill (http://marsmovieguide.com/)
were pretty much dregs from the bottom of the barrel, as you could tell from
their titles: Zombie Cats from Mars and Cave
Women of Mars, both of them 21st
century pastiches of all the
lousy science-fiction and horror movies of the 1950’s and 1960’s with similar
titles and agendas. Zombie Cats from Mars was dated 2015, the direction was credited to someone or something
called “Montetré” (I had assumed this was either one of the actors, one of the
crew members or nobody in particular, but according to imdb.com “Montetré” is a
pseudonym for Monty Wayne Benson III and he has several other credits,
including MoonPi, Holed-Up and Marty
in Transit). It’s set in and around
Portland, Oregon (though Portland is “played” by Vancouver — not the one in British Columbia, Canada but the one
across the border from it in Washington, U.S.A.) and deals, as the title
suggests, with miniature flying saucers from Mars that come bearing cats with
eyes that glow red when they’re about to attack. Supposedly the cats live off
eating human brains à la the
zombies in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the myriad sequelae, remakes, reboots and
ripoffs of that surprisingly successful film (Night of the Living
Dead is no great shakes as cinema, but Zombie
Cats from Mars makes it look like a
masterpiece by comparison — hell, Zombie Cats from Mars makes Oversexed Rugsucker from Mars look like a masterpiece by comparison!).
Written by
Ryan Cloutier — or at least compiled by him from old science-fiction clichés,
many of them quite likely dredged up from his subconscious, perhaps under the
influence of mind-altering substances (one attendee of the screening wondered
how much pot was being smoked during the conception of this script, though I suspect
it must have been laced with PCP or some other equally unpleasant adulterant) —
Zombie Cats from Mars posited
that at some point in the past a super-cat named Sassafras relocated to Mars
and founded a cult which became known as the CATholic Church. Its ultimate aim
was to conquer the universe for zombie cat-dom and eliminate all competing
species, and as the first step towards this aim it sent a spaceship to Portland
in 1915 and let out some zombie cats who killed four people before flying away
again. Sassafras’s cult decided to try it again 100 years later — it’s
established that at some point in their history the zombie cats figured out how
to make themselves immortal — and they knock off nine people. The hero of our
story is Billy Robers (Bransen Sands Koehler, who’s cute enough that he has a
potential movie career ahead of him if only he learns to act), who lives in
Portland with his mom Holly (Stephanie Leet) and her 10-year-old son Tommy
(Benni Harper). It’s established that Billy and Tommy have different fathers —
throughout the movie, whenever anyone refers to Tommy as Billy’s brother, Billy
corrects them and says, “Half-brother.”
It’s also established that both men in Holly’s life simply walked out on her,
though it appears that she knows the whereabouts of Billy’s dad, at least.
Anyway, Billy and Tommy do a paper route together (a pretty recherché
plot gimmick for the 21st
century) and continually get bullied by someone named Cody (Edward Zopf, who
looks like he’s got potential to grow into a quite attractive “bear” type).
When he’s not on his paper route Billy spends a lot of time in his room
watching ancient science-fiction movies — the imdb.com page on this one claims
the film we see on his TV is Manos: The Hands of Fate, a particularly notorious Mystery Science
Theatre 3000 “target” and one of the few
movies on earth even worse than Zombie Cats from Mars — and for some reason the imdb.com page about this
film describes Billy as “effeminate.” I presume that’s because there’s one
scene in which Billy and his best friend Cameron (Estevan Muñoz) are shown in
bed together, but they’re not touching each other or doing much of anything
except staring straight ahead, presumably at the TV showing one of those old
tacky movies Billy loves. One night Billy and Cameron see one of the Martian
flying saucers land, and then people start dying: first a jogger in the hills,
then a heavy-set middle-aged local woman named Percis (Janae’ Werner) who has a
house full of cats (which helps spread the death toll as other people in the
neighborhood take in her cats, not realizing that some of them are the lethal
zombie cats), then an ice cream truck driver (Greg Fish) and two would-be
customers, then Billy’s mom and (half-)brother, then the couple Lester (Joon
Rhee) and Carolyn (Cheyanne Shaw) who work at the local church, and then the
Black police detective (Bobby Bridges) who’s investigating the killings and who
was unsurprisingly dismissive when Billy tried to explain to him, based on a
book he’d found among his dad’s effects at home, that the killings were being
carried out by (dare I say it!) zombie cats from Mars. Finally the town’s mayor
(Josh Edward) is killed, bringing the death toll to nine, and according to the
book Billy read the cats can only be killed if they’re sprayed with holy water.
Accordingly Billy gets a big squirt gun and practices in his backyard with
ordinary water and cardboard cut-outs of cats, then decides he’s ready for
prime time and goes to the local church to steal some holy water — only he’s caught
by the priest (Ernest Adams) and soon learns that this is a CATholic Church,
meaning they’re on the other side. The parishioners surround Billy with
murderous intent in Montetré’s most direct visual quote from Night of
the Living Dead, and just when they’re
about to add him to the death toll, the film cuts to Billy’s bedroom and … it
was all a dream. Or was it? There’s another shot of a cat with glowing red eyes, the signal for
an upcoming zombie-cat attack, and then Billy wakes up again.
Done with the right campy tone, Zombie
Cats from Mars could have worked — there
are some marvelous scenes, notably the opening credits that parody the FBI
anti-pirating logo and the disclaimers on DVD’s that the commentaries and
interviews don’t reflect the opinions of the producing studio or anyone
associated with them, and the scenes with two newscasters, a man and a woman,
gossiping about the other people working for their TV station (including who’s
having sex with whom and whose lawfully wedded spouse better not find out about
it) and, when they’re actually on camera, cutting back and forth between news
of the murders and the most light-hearted fluff pieces writer Cloutier could
think of. But most of the film is shot with a dreary dullness that works
neither as legitimate entertainment nor as camp, and about all we’re given to
watch are some remarkably pretty young men (notably the therapist who’s
interviewing Billy in the opening scene, who may or may not have turned up
later as one of the victims) doing not particularly interesting things. Zombie
Cats from Mars is that particular sort of
horrible movie that was intended
to be horrible but turned out even worse than intended! One imdb.com reviewer
said that Zombie Cats from Mars
started out as a YouTube serial — which would explain why it’s a series of
disconnected incidents with little more than a central premise connecting them
— and it reaches its silliest moments when one of the zombie cats saws through
a gas pipe to fill up the home of the church couple with gas and thus
asphyxiate them. (I’m not making this up, you know; it couldn’t help but remind
me of how my late roommate/home-care client John P. turned against the original
Jurassic Park movie when it asked
us to believe that the velociraptors could have figured out how to manipulate a
doorknob and open a door.)
