TNBA reviews: Cult of the Cat

Catwoman’s transformation from morally troubled kleptomaniac with a wildlife activist slant to a full-fledged femme fatale with nary a moral concern is both beneficial and problematic in varying respects. Beneficial because it delivers her from the preachy tepidity of animal rights crusades; problematic because it hollows out her character into something unbendingly amoral, an almost ghoulish abstraction who never fails to get her way, even when cornered by multiple opponents. The love affair between Batman and Catwoman that seemed plausible but unlikely is now jettisoned as a ludicrous impossibility.

Cult of the Cat places this new hedonistic, thrill-seeking and self-serving Catwoman front and center in a superfluous thriller involving a cult of cat-worshipping, blood-lusting zealots out to get her, either for the purpose of her bodily sacrifice or her conversion. Naturally Batman gets caught up in the chase, trading didactic aphorisms in between punches as he attempts to help Catwoman worm her way out of her mess. For the most part, the first two acts are breezy action fluff, the cult barreling onward like minions in a brainless action flick and every supposed pause a setup for a more explosive surprise. The incipiently irksome animation recedes in the wake of non-stop bravura storyboarding, so that one’s sense of animation quality is gradually displaced by a passive enjoyment of ceaseless movement, fluid or not.

Unfortunately this all comes screeching to a halt when Catwoman is captured by the cult and confronted by its leader, Thomas Blake. The story, and the devious allegiances and flagrant lies on which it rests, is ultimately boring and transparent. When Batman and Catwoman do an iteration of the same morality play they have been doing since The Cat and the Claw, the only apparent rearranging of their dynamic comes with Catwoman’s dispositional change from morally conflicted to morally indifferent. Batman, apparently unable to keep from investing his hope and trust in someone so perpetually dishonest, becomes the unlikely victim of a not-by-any-means unforeseeable double cross.

A third act gladiatorial fight with a giant, mutated cat monster doubles back to the brainless action fun of the first act, but it trades in fast-paced kinetics for subdued spatial confinement. If the prospect of a concentrated fight in an underground arena seems promising, that is only because fixed locations are usually accompanied by worthwhile visual décor. Without anything particularly grabbing to justify such an extended sequence—the surplus of analytical editing growing particularly tiresome—the fight reads more as a videogame boss battle than a high-stakes act-closer. The only integral information nested within is Catwoman’s obligatory betrayal of the cult to come to Batman’s aid.

By the time she commits a third backstabbing reversal of allegiance, escaping to Paris with a vast sum of jewels stolen from her former captors, it becomes apparent that her playful sociopathy is here to stay, if of course we didn’t reach that conclusion in the episode’s first few minutes.

TNBA reviews: Critters

Batman as a character has survived hundreds of different incarnations spanning several decades. Some fans appreciate the character and the DC franchise for the versatility that accompanies constant reinvention, while others are slightly more closed minded. In recent decades, Batman has epitomized a popular flavor of psychological anarchy, excess darkness and realism, and anti-authoritarian coolness. When something like Critters pops up daring to merge American Gothic placeholders for rural America with outrageous biological experimentation, in the result yielding stampeding insects and a barrage of verbal and visual puns, then many fans react as if insulted or slighted. To them, the tonal exclusivity of Batman’s universe rules out such scenarios unconditionally.

I am of a different mindset entirely. Versatility is key not only to the enduring fascination, but also to the accessibility of the DC Animated Universe, and challenges to the internal stability of Batman are posed all the time, both in terms of continuity and atmosphere. In addition to the obligatory continuity errors that crop up from time to time, there are questions of whether visual redesigns make a dent on believable narrative continuity, or whether the immense technological disparity between the world of Superman and that of Batman mars the realism of either, or how the Batman of Justice League can possibly be the same as the Batman of Batman: the Animated Series, and so on. As far as atmosphere goes, the range of genres and storytelling modes would seem to destabilize what many fans perceive as a fixed state of dark realism.

Critters is a difficult episode because it defies categorization and doesn’t appear to market itself as a unique genre piece or comic escapade. Insofar as Farmer Brown is an unambiguous bad guy who is out for revenge and as Batman and co. are out to stop him, Critters is a typical villain-of-the-week offering with no obvious fourth-wall breaks or similar meta-textual veneers. On the grounds of character motivations or interactions, suspense, pacing, etc. Critters wavers between bland conventionality and flat-out incompetence. From an immediate transition between a genetically modified cow’s rampage and the ensuing trial that condemns its engineer to lose all research funding to an out-of-nowhere stampede of havoc-wreaking praying mantises, Critters does little to nurture believability or suspense, and the collective dullness of the Bat-family never quivers.

But it is not at a loss for conceptual aplomb, taking its bizarre foundation to even more radical extremes. If the fact of a genius biological engineer who just happens to be a gaunt farmer with a hillbilly daughter isn’t enough to disarm the viewer with originality, or at the very least queerness, then there is a smorgasbord of other things that will. From Farmer Brown’s artificial farm boxed into a giant offshore silo to a talking goat that breaches the defenses of Police Headquarters, Critters is almost uncomfortable in how many unpredictable turns it takes. Fiddle and blues guitar fill in the rural horror on the soundtrack while TV Western actor Peter Breck calmly and authentically channels Joe R. Landsdale’s distinguished genre-specific dialogue.

The backlash against Critters isn’t entirely a reactionary outrage over its refusal to play by the rules; it is stiltedly directed and very poorly animated, all while preferring spectacle to characterization and nuance. But as spectacle, Critters is exceptional. It offers sights and sounds that defy all sense, and on a first viewing, no matter how egregious it may appear to the mortified viewer, I would gambit that it is impossible not to follow it with bewildered curiosity to the very end.