Down with America 3: Moldy Kitten (1999, NR)

Directed by Richard Ferrando

Written by Danielle Ervin, Richard Ferrando, Grant Goodman, Joe Kaczkowski, Karen Mester, Justin Mickley, Aaron Miller

Based on Down with America by Mary Hornbacher

Starring Joe Kaczkowski, Aaron Miller, Karen Mester, Josh Raab, and Meri Stevens

As Reviewed by James Brundage

This is a multi-faceted job. I wrote, in a review of Firestorm, that being a film critic is like having a doctorate in theology: people are always asking you "why?" I revise this. Most people don’t bother asking you "why" as much as they bother asking you about the trends. They think that you have some mystic knowledge of whats trendy. That you know what’s hot and what’s not.

The truth is that being a movie critic is something akin to Number Theory. It is your job to observe patterns in the current fabric of the universe of celluloid. You pick up paradoxes, learn the exceptions to the rules, and try to make sense of it all. As in theology and mathematics, it rarely works.

An interesting paradox I have run across in my studies is one of originality. Just last night, I trashed the Anthony Hopkins/Cuba Gooding, Jr. collaboration Instinct on the account of it not having an ounce of originality. However, sitting at the keyboard typing my review of Moldy Kitten, I think only of how unoriginal it is, which poses a question to me:

Is the lack of originality just an excuse a critic uses as a measure of their personal distaste for a film?

I wonder if these years I have been doing this job, this quasi-rubric that I grade films on, is really worth anything. Have I been lying to myself this entire time, seeing as I am able to like a film like Moldy Kitten: a movie with a terrible plot, and dislike Instinct: another movie with a terrible plot?

The question to ponder is what makes good and bad. Seeing as this question fringes on morals and is thus not at all the business of the movie critic, who does not bear a nation’s moral responsibility on his or her shoulders (we’ll leave that to Jerry Falwell to worry about), I think I’d better leave that alone and get on with my review of Moldy Kitten.

Moldy Kitten follows Brian Ferrell (Aaron Miller), a cliché character that we have never been able to help but like. His life has been destroyed after he was implicated in the murder of his fiancée (whom he still loves) and, three years later; he is just now getting back into the game by dating Ellen McMurphy (Karen Mester). This hardly sounds like the previous two parts of the trilogy.

Let’s throw in the fact that Aaron was the fiancée of the librarian offed in the first film and is dating a woman who lives two doors down from the Mystery Man (Joe Kaczkowski) and a series of bloody murders are taking place in the background. We throw in alien abductions and conspiracies to cover up the existence of The Book, the very item which has haunted the entire trilogy of films.

Being a veteran of movies, I can safely say that the plot is nothing new. Like many plots, it is a mix and mash of dozens of movies and thus not original at all… or is it.

Originality, the magic ingredient to a film that everyone wants and almost no one has, comes in two forms. One form is in the story itself. The other is in the method in which the story is done. The entire genre of dark comedy has made a career out of thanatological comedy: the same gag done on a live man is much funnier when the person is dead (at least sometimes). Seeing something new does not always come in the form of complete originality, but in styles we haven’t seen before.

Moldy Kitten does this. It incorporates a Western style showdown and an X-Files class abduction with a strange ditty of a romance. When we mix and match plots in film, they are usually conventional, which is what Moldy Kitten refuses to do.

Instead of playing by the rules, it plays to have fun.

So should you.