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Catman in Lethal Track
Holy balls, is this movie ever horrible. Perhaps not surprisingly, Catman in Lethal Track comes to you from the masters of shlock, producer Joseph Lai and director Godfrey Ho -- who is trying to hide under the screen name of Alton Cheung for this half-ass effort of farting out a motion picture.
Lai and Ho were notorious back in the 1980's and 90's for taking footage from various productions and splicing them together in order to create "new" titles to fool ignorant corporate video store buyers, who were seemingly willing to put anything emblazoned with "martial arts" on their covers onto the shelves of their businesses.
Catman follows this M.O. to a tee, but the end results are even more disjointed than most of Lai and Ho's efforts. At least two films have been mashed up here. The first is your fairly standard cheap actioner with a disgraced mercenary sobering up long enough to team up with a tomboy sidekick (who apparently has the magical power of being able to fire a shotgun from a moving motorcycle simply by resting her foot on the handlebar) to take out a group of thugs who are threatening a Thai village.
The second -- and certainly more perplexing -- shallow mine of source footage comes from some utter tosh about a white dude living in Thailand who wants to be a CIA agent but can't hack the entrance tests. But after being scratched by a radioactive cat, ultra whiteboy becomes "Catman" and sets out to take on evil, which comes in the form of a priest who is actually a Satanist and not a Catholic the badly patched-up costume he sports would lead you to believe.
Yes, I'm serious. That's the plot. A radioactive cat. Ugh. Where's my beer? Actually, forget that, you'd need to slam Jager -- and a whole bunch of it -- to even drain any semblance of enjoyment from this dreck. I mean, really, a radioactive cat? Are you serious, Mr. Ho? The sad fact coming out of this is that Godfrey Ho is now a film professor in Hong Kong, so apparently now he's teaching people how to construct movies like this.
Anyway, Lai and Ho try and make something, anything, resembling a movie here. Namely, they employ some extremely clumsy editing and a dub that makes those old Shaw Brothers movies sound like they were voiced by Shakespearean actors. As you might guess, it doesn't work all that well, and the end result is one big huge pile of stinky filthy smelly dung poo-poo crap attempting to masquerade as a motion picture. You know, like one of those things with an actual script and real actors -- which apparently neither Lai or Ho has ever seen, because Catman comes nowhere close to being even an enjoyable B-movie cheesefest.
All that being said, Catman isn't the worst movie this reviewer has ever seen. That particular "honor" still goes to the William Hung cinematic kidney punch known as Where is Mama's Boy. But it is pretty goddamn awful. You might think this sort of stuff would be good fodder for a "kill a few beers and rip on an awful movie" night. And you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. Stay the hell away from this trash if you value your brain cells. RATING: 1 |
