I think I’ve caught all of this film at various times when switching on the telly late at night, half-drunk and stumbling in from the pub. And although I’d never watched the whole thing at once, end to end, I would still always recognise it.
Basically, it is three Stephen King short stories converted into shorter films and loosely tied together by a cat travelling through the lives of various people. Our first story sees James Woods going to Quitters Inc., a Mafia-controlled quit smoking company with some very effective - if less than scrupulous - methods.
The cat then travels on (while interpreting strange paranormal signals from a little girl calling the cat to help her) and meets a man given an option by a compulsive gambler. He can walk the five-inch-wide ledge around the gambler’s penthouse and get his wife and a stack of money, or be framed for drug dealing. Some choice.
Finally, we meet the little girl as she wrestles with the dark and a creature intent on stealing her breath as she sleeps.
Overall, Stephen King’s novels were attaining a phenomenal popularity around this time and as he’s written the screenplay here, he’s thrown in numerous cameo performances from his other best-sellers. Cujo is here, as is Christine, plus references to The Dead Zone and Pet Sematary. Then, of course, there’s the little Firestarter herself in the lead human role. King even manages to have a little dig at himself in one of James Woods’ lines.
While well-shot with some fairly decent special effects (for 1984), the film lacks any real drive or purpose. Perhaps this lies in the short story angle that can work so well for a book but practically be suicide for a movie. We are used to short stories on television, however we don’t really expect them at the cinema. Films like Pulp Fiction (that truly re-invented the genre) work due to the tying together of film threads to create a whole overall picture. Here those threads are left to dangle and there’s really not enough interest to see them wound up. All along we know this is the case; that this is three shorts tied loosely and there won’t be a unifying twist at the end and therefore anticipation wilts away.
| "Well begun is half done…" |
Oddly though, a King story like Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, an absolute classic prison movie (shot as The Shawshank Redemption, of course) if ever there was one, is a singular short story (or novella) appearing in the four-novella book Different Seasons. (Incidentally, a couple of the others were made into films that were also semi-decent: Apt Pupil and The Body - filmed as Stand By Me). The Green Mile (sold under the delicious pun of ‘Serial Thriller’) in six individual parts released a month apart was also brilliant, yet strung together into one film. So who’s to say there’s a hard and fast rule to any of this?
Be that as it may, Cat’s Eye lies among the many, many average Stephen King book translations that doesn’t have anywhere near the lasting strength of Shawshank or Green Mile. And, thankfully, this screenplay wasn’t anywhere near as totally disastrous as the one he wrote specifically for the screen, Maximum Overdrive.
Man, that film was crap.
If you’re a hardcore Stephen King fan (I was hooked after The Tommyknockers, but Misery was his crowning achievement. Misery too sits among those few decent film versions of King’s novels) you may well need this for your collection. If you like how Drew Barrymore has been cute for her entire life (even during Poison Ivy) this is a good collection of her acting range as she plays several roles here (and is credited simply as ‘Our Girl’).
It’s not among the best of King’s book-to-film transitions, but it is a superlative transfer of an older film. Whether that’s enough is one I must leave up to you, gentle reader.
