The Cat from Outer Space (1978)

Truly Dreadful Film

A different way of telling a story

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

If you cannot enjoy a film where the hero is a gorgeous cat with a magic collar then you probably also hate other fantasy films like the Harry Potter series. You certainly need to chill out and stop watching all those super-serious gritty movies and enjoy some escapist fantasy ones instead.This remains the one and only film that my wife and I have ever paid hard-earned cash to see more than once at the cinema. It's that good, but only if you are a cat-lover!

Norman Tokar directed this science fiction comedy about a cat(named Jake) from outer space who crash lands on Earth and is forced to enlist the help of a physicist(played by Ken Berry) his girlfriend(played by Sandy Duncan) along with the Army(led by Harry Morgan) and a team of scientists(including McLean Stevenson) to help him repair his ship, and send him home, and courtesy of an advanced collar, Jake can talk! Of course, enemy forces(led by Roddy McDowall) want to exploit Jake for their own purposes. Interesting how the plot has similarities to later blockbuster "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial"; pity that this silly and contrived film has little of that films' intelligence and quality. Cat lovers may well be disappointed.(I should know!)

Disney's 'The Cat From Outer Space,' released in 1978 and starring Ken Berry and McLean Stevenson as two military engineers who help an alien named Jake, who just happens to be a cat! The chaos of comedy ensues as Jake is on the run from being caught by the military commander, Harry Morgan, and from being stuck on Earth. Jake must fix his own spaceship in order to leave Earth and return to his mother-ship. For that to happen though, he needs Gold! $120,000 worth of gold, that is. How does he get the money? Jesse White of Maytag repair fame, co-stars as a loan shark who makes a bet with Frank (Ken Berry) and Link (Stevenson) for the money. Meanwhile, the woman that Frank is in love with (Sandy Duncan) is interfering with the objective. In the end, Jake the cat gets what he wants. After all, it is a Disney film, what else could happen?

I really can't say why, but this movie's premise just cracks me up. Seeing that cat emerge from the UFO and stroll so gracefully down the plank has the same effect on me now as it had when I saw the movie as a kid – I just start laughing really hard for a good half minute or so. It's not a bad movie, actually, and the humor is deliberate. I think it's even funnier because the spaceship and the alien cat's mission are treated with such seriousness from the get-go, leaving all the goofy humor to the human characters.Part of what makes it so great of course is just the fact that they picked a cat. With a dog this movie would be in the words of one character, "Dumb. Very dumb." But cats are just that way… no matter where you put then, they pretty much look and act as if they own the place. So you put that cat with his magic collar on a UFO and darned if he doesn't really belong there, which I think is what makes it so bizarre.It's great how, without computers, they were able to get that cat to react in appropriate ways in scenes with the actors… what I wouldn't give to be a fly on the all (or, a cat on the couch!) in that editing conference. The human actors, even people with loads of talent like Roddy McDowell and Harry Morgan, don't stand a chance of upstaging this feline extraterrestrial. I love how Jake (that's the cat) is more realistic and down to earth than his human scientist buddy, Frank (Ken Berry). Berry doesn't have much screen presence, but would the movie actually be better if it was Steve McQueen? Sandy Duncan on the other hand I thought was very engaging and had a real flair for deadpan humor. She reminds me of other great 60s film comediennes like Goldie Hawn and Debbie Walley.As a side note, I kind of felt Spielberg's "E.T." borrowed some elements from this film. You have the friendly misunderstood alien, the glowing collar instead of a glowing finger, and even a flying bike! The whole framework of having an alien befriend the humans is old-hat nowadays but actually was pretty unusual before E.T. (you had a few in the 50s… "Day the Earth Stood Still" and "Space People", but not much in the mid/late 60s or early 70s).One thing that's interesting watching the movie now in the 21st Century is how other than the cat every major character is an adult. You would never see a kids' film these days that doesn't even have children in it. Speaking as one who saw the movie as a child (though not when it was released… probably a decade later when I was 12 or so), I never had a problem with that and it never would have occurred to me at that time. So I think modern family filmmakers are probably guilty of underestimating the imagination of children and their ability to empathize with adult characters.This film never aimed to be high art, but it's still noticeable how well it does accomplish its limited goals – a tiny dose of sci-fi/fantasy, a good deal of action, and a lot of slapstick and situational humor. The special effects, by the way, are actually pretty good for their time. The digital graphics on the UFO's display screens and the control panel itself are more convincing than the computers you see in stuff like the original Star Trek series or "Logan's Run" which just came out a few years before this film. All of this detail greatly adds to the humor of seeing this domestic animal placed in this environment.Cats have always been known for their inscrutable stares and associated with divine wisdom. This film has strong charm despite being limited by its own ambition, and maybe even more so in retrospect since nowadays these things are done with effects instead of real animals. I wonder if kids really can connect to a computerized image of a cat in the same way they can relate to a real cat like the ones in their neighborhoods.