The Cat

A journalist sees something fall from the night sky and goes after it. The trail leads to a woman, a man and a cat. None of them is from Earth; they have come from another planet and something is hunting them. The cat is the trio's fighter. Lam Nai-Choi directs, from a story in Ni Kuang's Wisely series. The film belongs to the strange period of Hong Kong cinema at the end of the eighties and start of the nineties. Genre boundaries had more or less dissolved; science fiction, horror, action and comedy mixed inside the same picture, and this is one of the extreme instances of that mixture. Its best known scene is the fight between the cat and the dog. It was shot with real animals and turned into an extended battle through undercranking. The sequence was discussed for years and is why the film is now cited as a characteristic example of production practices that ignored animal welfare. The effects were built to the budget conditions of the time: puppets, models and stop motion together. Lam Nai-Choi is remembered as one of Hong Kong's most extreme directors, known for films like Riki-Oh, and his cult audience comes largely from that line. Who it is for: viewers curious about the far edge of Hong Kong genre cinema and about cult production. Who it is not for: there is real violence against animals, the story does not hold together, and the technical quality is poor.