We all know there are bad movies. A lot of bad movies. I listed the 10 worst movies from January to June of 2015, and Nerd listed his 10 worst of 2015, of which there was only one film of overlap! These are unredemptively bad movies (though, I’m reserving opinion on Jem and the Holograms, which sounds terribly FABU).
But, then there are those rare few that transcend bad into the realm of gloriously awful. These movies penetrate the fabric of time and space to pick up and revel in all of our culture’s worst tendencies, while still managing to expose just how mind-rottingly awful those tendencies can be. And, so I present Catwoman, a gloriously campy comic book movie that has escaped from the depths of the American psyche into the lists of bad movie fandom. This is a film that just can’t die.
Patience Philips (Halle Berry) is a woefully meek graphic designer for Hedare Beauty, run by husband and wife George (Lambert Wilson) and Laurel (Sharon Stone) Hedare. Hedare Beauty is launching a new line of products that cause headaches and fainting when used regularly, and disfigurement when not. Along with the new line, Laurel is finally being ousted as the face of Hedare for a newer, younger face. Patience is the lead designer on the new product launch until she overhears the product’s side effects, and she is promptly killed and then resurrected by a cult of hobo cats who breathe on her. Now as the new cat woman, she has to exact her revenge on those who killed her, namely Laurel Hedare.
Because this is a movie about women, of course looks and beauty have to be at the heart of the story. You may recognize large chunks of this movie as a somewhat jumbled mishmash of a subplot from Tim Burton’s Batman with bits of appropriated mythology and corporate paranoia thrown in. At the surface, Catwoman could be a critique of our cult of beauty and the corporations that fuel it to feed on it, but Pitof puts Halle Berry in a skimpy dominatrix leather outfit and gives her a “Grrrl Power” makeup montage that inevitably resembles the degrading makeover montage of Vertigo that cut Kim Novak into bits. As the text of the movie is criticizing beauty products and our worship of youth, it still manages to make Catwoman into a hypersexualized red-lipsticked sex machine.
It almost seems that Pitof and the three credited male writers (the only female writer is noted with a “story” credit only) sincerely believe that they’re making a grrrl power movie, but they keep mixing up what grrrl power means. Frances Conroy, Catwoman‘s crazy cat lady, says she was a professor for 20 years, but quit when they didn’t give her tenure, throwing the offhanded “male academia” comment. Catwoman and Laurel Hedare are women who exist outside the rules of society, and that’s the only way women can get ahead. The soundtrack is filled with Hi-NRG techno songs that use “Free Your Mind”-esque guitar riffs and have women soul vamping all over the soundtrack, mixing up girl power ballads with orgasmic disco.
Once Patience turns into Catwoman, Halle Berry takes on cat-like tendencies. This means landing on all fours, being able to squeeze through bars, being addicted to catnip, disappearing like Gozer whenever somebody looks away for the briefest of seconds, cracking a whip, playing basketball…you know, cat stuff! All while wearing stilletto heels.
The tropes don’t end there. Like any mid-’00s movie, Patience has two sassy side kicks as co-workers, one being a sassy girlfriend, and the other being an even sassier gay friend. The sassy girlfriend is a sexed-up alcoholic who worships the beauty products that are doing damage, while the sassy gay friend is just around to back her up. Beyond that, these two co-worker friends apparently bought Patience her fetishistic leather outfit as a date-night costume (they wanted her to go to a coffee shop looking like a Dominatrix?).
But, beyond all that, director Pitof engages in the worst of the Michael Bay tendencies. He hyper-edits with no clear rhyme or reason, with a particularly egregious example coming in the first chase sequence where he constantly flips the camera across the 180 degree line, for no good reason. He has egregiously simplistic characters, but, best of all, he engages in hilarious CGI indulgences such as making the camera fall down the throat of a meowing cat.
Catwoman isn’t a good movie. It’s a terrible movie. It’s a movie that should never have existed. Yet, Catwoman remains fascinating in just how much it exposes about our culture while doing nothing but be terrible.
