MAD CATS (2023) Review (Slamdance Film Festival)

Sometimes things go unnoticed for years until someone draws attention to them. Case in point, in the press kit for Reiki Tsuno’s Mad Cats – he remarks that most Independent Japanese films are “so sad, serious, and depressing most of the time… Budgets for indie movies in Japan are actually much smaller than ones overseas. It is difficult to make something exciting and flashy because they simply cost a lot”. Within the Japanese indie space, you have to go back a long way to find a Japanese movie that isn’t exactly as he says, One Cut of the Dead and Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes being two meagre examples. His feature debut received its world premiere in Park City, Utah’s Slamdance Film Festival is also one to add to that shortlist.

It’s a safe claim to say that you likely won’t have seen many films like Mad Cats; it’s a true one-of-a-kind. However, tonally it sits in the gap between Quentin Dupieux’s more recent work (Incredible but True), Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and the more absurdist British films coming out of our chronically underfunded independent film scene. In Tsuno’s micro-budget feature, Taka (Sho Mineo) is an aimless young man who receives a cassette in the post that leads him on an adventure to find his missing brother, Mune (So Yamanaka). Along the way, he teams up with a new quirky friend who he finds sleeping in a multi-story car park, Takezo (Yuya Matsuura), and a mysterious young girl (Ayane). And he needs help as he becomes the prey of a gang of vicious monster cats determined to execute unscrupulous pet shop owners.

Without watching the film, it sounds like an action movie with an every-man thrown into an unlikely situation, but the on-the-page synopsis says nothing of Mad Cats’ weirdness. In Tsuno’s script, the cat monsters are mute ladies clad in black who exhibit murderous aggression albeit accompanied by the devil may care attitude and distant behaviour you find in cats. There’s a running gag featuring a monster cat lady with a Chinese sword which never fails to be funny. Why cats are humanoid remains unexplained, their aggression, however, is caused by an ancient greek artefact. All of this plays into the genesis of the writer/director wanting to make a fun Japanese film. The lead character, too – his cowardice hits an inept plateau occupied by the likes of Dead Stream’s Shawn. Mad Cats is an absurdist comedy first, everything else second.

The nature of the comedy is practical, playing into the director’s hope of appealing to a more global audience. Dig deep enough into Japanese comedy, and you’ll find it leans heavily on language puns almost untranslateable to Euro-American languages. There is one brilliant exception, a story involving a cockroach and a centipede told by Takezo. Elsewhere, there are moving backdrops in static cars, power edits and cuts common in Sammo Hung comedies and a deadpan weirdness that shows the director was influenced by his time studying in Ireland. Comedy may well be in the eye of the beholder, yet these eyes bought into everything Tsuno and his incredibly game cast offered. Yet, one gag feels out of place: an admittedly funny advert for fictional cat food that appears throughout (yum yum catness). Almost a non-sequitur, the advert introduces a character later used to illustrate the threat that Taka, Mune, and Takezo face. It makes sense within the narrative – the implementation, however, is less elegant.

Ayane, who appears as ‘the mysterious young girl’, harbours ambitions to become a world-class action star, and she certainly makes a strong start towards achieving this. Any scene that hinges on her physicality shows the film at its best. Kicking and punching through the fighty felines is on a level every bit the equal of female action stars, modern or classic, whether you are talking of your “Jeeja” Vismistananda or your Etsuko Shihomi’s. Or Michelle Yeoh, in her action years, to offer someone with more name recognition. The editing is a little funky, but I say this as a 1980s Hong Kong Action purist. The gun violence is all CG based, but that’s a Japan-wide issue rather than a Mad Cats issue – and, as the saying goes, “don’t hate the player, hate the game”.

You know it’s a micro-indie when the credits don’t go on for 15 minutes, and having such a small cast and crew allows this to be a purely charming and likeable film as intended. Sure, the cinematography is a little flat, and the CG gunfire is weak, but there is more quality in Mad Cats that offset those weaknesses entirely. Picking just two things, the musical score by Yuki Hotta & Amish Noise has just as much personality as the characters and the locations add beautifully to the uncanny flavour. It will divide opinion, as deadpan absurdism always does. For everyone that finds it too silly, there’ll be someone else who loves their time with Reiki Tsuno, his cast and Mad Cats

Rob’s Archive Mad Cats (2023)