Strays aka Killer Cats (1991)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) While Strays is very much an undistinguished made-for-TV horror-lite movie featuring a pack of killer cats, it occasionally lurches into so-bad-it’s-fun territory. The trouble begins when a prototypical family moves into an isolated house previously owned by a cat lady and the grieving cats start plotting a progressive campaign of terror against the clearly substandard new humans. It’s rather fun once the filmmakers turn desperate in showing menacing cats and throwing them on the actors as they shriek more loudly than the felines. Alas, this is no camp classic—Babylon 5’s Claudia Christian shows up in a substantial role, but disappears from the film too soon. Furthermore, the film suffers from severe padding issues, with much of the first hour just marking time for the last act, and raising a number of subplots that are not just stupid, but also useless. On the other hand, if you watch Strays’ first five minutes and skip ahead to its last half-hour, you just may get some entertainment out of it.