Uninvited (1987)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) A strong contender in the so-bad-it’s-strangely-compelling category, Uninvited is significantly worse than your usual horror film, but in ways that have you looking forward to the next inanity. The stupidity starts early on with the idea of an adorable orange tabby cat somehow transforming back and forth in a horrifying puppet creature that murders people. Writer-director-producer Greydon Clark means to evoke a sense of claustrophobia by setting almost all of the film aboard a yacht with fewer than ten characters, but the limited competence of everyone associated with the film soon sabotages anything beyond mild comedy. The special effects are almost uniformly terrible, only to be outdone by, well, everything else from costumes to acting to staging to dialogues (even in dubbed French). Uninvited’s only marginal success is overall directing and pacing because as terrible as the elements of the film can be, it does move briskly from one set-piece to another, and it becomes a game to spot the next Truly Dumb Thing on the menu. Even the snarky Wikipedia plot summary can’t help itself, as it mentions how the characters somehow use a sextant to perform blood analysis, or how the different cat at the end of the film undermines the sense of cyclical doom that it means to invoke. George Kennedy somehow ends up stuck in the middle of this—although he checks out midway through, having completed his job of attaching a recognizable name to the marquee. The other actors are much worse than him, which is saying something. The result is a truly bad film, but one that does have a certain constant interest to it—I’m probably going to remember Uninvited much longer than most of the other movies I’ve seen this week.