Uninvited (1988)

topichtennis on 8/15/2022 Reply  ·  Like  ·  (0 likes)

In memory of the recently deceased Clu Gulager, I decided to watch one of his movies... Uninvited from 1987. Now Gulager was in quite a bit of schlock this movie is no different, but he was also in some good stuff like Return of the Living Dead and even The Last Picture Show. But I'm always shocked to see George Kennedy pop up in things like this, I mean he's an Academy Award winner for Christ's sake. But I guess when you fall, you fall hard. Supposedly about half the budget of this film was spent on these two guys, which I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Uninvited is that age old story of a demon cat living inside a regular cat, that comes out to kill people, and then promptly crawls back inside the normal cat's mouth. It's kinda like a feline version of Malignant from last year.

Why is this cat inside the other cat? We have no clue, as there's no backstory given. As the opening credits play, we see the cat at a research facility maul everyone inside and escape. Why did they place a cat inside another cat? Why did they make its bite venomous? The world will never know, as right after the credits we abruptly switch genres.

Yes, we see two girls get involved with a sleazy business man, who drowns one of his partners in a hot tub. We are now in a crime thriller. And not even 20 minutes into the movie are we introduced to our "surviving couple". Structure-wise, the "final girl" is usually on screen early on, that way you can develop their character.

The cat, the businessman, and the beach babes all find their way onto a fancy yacht. And then we switch back into slasher mode as this cat starts hunting down everyone, one by one.

It's just the damndest thing, this plot. It's like two separate screenplays got randomly shuffled together. I wonder what idea came first, "we'll strand gangsters on a boat... but then what happens... let's add in a devil cat." Or did they want to make a demon cat movie and had trouble on figuring how to make the cat less evadable, so we'll just throw some randomly generated characters on a boat.

There's some decent special effects, the blood looks good. The evil cat muppet is adorable, but they only used two cat sounds throughout the entire movie, which gets really annoying quick. The sound design is really bad. The music is garbage and unfitting, Clu Gulager is wearing some weird bucky beaver fake teeth.

There's not much to see here with this movie, unless you want a good laugh, or if you're curious to see a cat crawl out of another cat's mouth.