As I’ve stated before, I was
fascinated with monsters and special effects as a child (let’s face it, I still
am). Aside from the paper monster action
figures I used to construct (okay, they were drawings I used to cut out), I
also made monster hand puppets. Make no
mistake, however, I was no Jim Henson,
although I like to think that he would have appreciated what I was doing. My puppets were made from small brown paper
lunch bags. I would draw some monsters
(a werewolf, King Kong, et cetera) on the bags in crayon, replete with
fang-filled maws, and then spend hours playing with them. The advantage these had over the cutouts was
that they were 3-D. The disadvantage
was…well, there was no disadvantage.
They were fun, and for the youngest of six children in a household where
money wasn’t exactly flowing, they were another way to be creative and invent
toys that simply didn’t exist and/or weren’t profligate like they are today (I
would have been like a pig in shit had I been able to lay my grubby little
hands on actual action figures of Sanda and Gaila from War of the Gargantuas). I
suppose that today enterprising kids can just design something on their
computer and 3-D print it, and half of me envies that. The other half of me is a little disheartened
by this, because I feel that the lack of tactility, the remove of technology,
robs the process of some of its magic (sort of like practical effects versus
computer generated effects). Who
knows? Maybe I’m just old and cranky
(actually, there’s no maybe about it). The
point is, I got more enjoyment out of my makeshift, paper bag hand puppets than
I did from Julio Perez Tabernero’s Sexy Cat.
Comic strip artist Graham hires
private dick (in more ways than one) Mike Cash (German Cobos) to find a way to prove that unctuous weasel Paul
Karpis (Beni Deus) stole his
character (the titular feline) and made a ton of money that rightfully belongs
to him. Graham is then conveniently
killed by a woman in a black leather catsuit (just like his creation). With a live action television series for the
character underway, the principals are knocked off in creative ways that mirror
the plots of the fictitious storylines.
But Mike has to earn his twenty dollars per day, so I guess somebody has
to eventually get to the bottom of all this.
At first blush, Sexy Cat appears to be Spain’s answer to
films like Danger: Diabolik and Barbarella (there’s even a Barbarella poster on Karpis’ wall,
seemingly from Jean-Claude Forest’s
comic and not Roger Vadim’s
film). At this time in Europe (late
Sixties, early Seventies), films featuring comic book characters (especially
those of the antiheroic persuasion) were flourishing. Films like Kriminal and Satanik
featured protagonists who, like characters such as Fu Manchu and Fantomas
before them, were criminals. The major
difference with the older properties is that the villains got top billing, but
they weren’t the heroes; guys like Nayland Smith and Inspector Juve were. This changed in 1966 after the Batman television series debuted (there
may be a few examples from beforehand, but none I can think of off the top of
my head). My guess is that, since Europe
didn’t have as robust a tradition of costumed heroes to draw from (again, very
few spring to my mind at the present, but then I never lived in Europe, either),
they instead turned to the wealth of costumed villains that they did have,
while maintaining the kitsch of the Caped Crusader’s program and the loungy
attitude prevalent in many films the world over. Sexy
Cat is in imitation of these later characters and their stories in more
ways than one. Sexy Cat is a murderess
who dispatches her victims in sadistically creative fashions (a Venetian
dagger, a coral snake, and so forth), and she wears a tight, sexy leather
catsuit (hence, her moniker, I assume, though she does also resemble Marvel
Comics’ Black Cat character to some degree).
But it’s the differences that are key.
First, the eponymous character only exists in this film; there was never
an actual comic strip featuring Sexy Cat (that I know of). Second, the character in this film doesn’t
exist either; She’s a person dressing up like Sexy Cat to do nefarious deeds,
more in line with the giallo tradition than the costumed antihero one. Which brings us to the third difference: Sexy
Cat in the film has no purpose other than to kill people. She has no grand scheme or elaborate heist
she needs to pull off. She’s essentially
a slasher in tight clothes. The movie,
then, is little more than a whodunit with nothing very interesting to tie any
of it together (but I’ll get to that later).
The use of Pop art in the film
also mimics the fashion of the time, and, for me, this and the metatextual
angle that comes along with it are the interesting facets of the picture. The film opens with paintings of Sexy Cat and
various murder implements/victims (they will be seen again in the film when an
artist displays them for Karpis, providing another link between art and
reality; we’re watching credits produced with art that a character in the film
produced for a fictitious television program [that we may be watching]). The colors are bright and flat with no
shading, and the shapes are delineated with fat, black outlines, accentuating
the falseness of the images (they reminded me of stained glass on canvas in
some ways). These credits are
interrupted twice with live action smash cuts, first to a wigged and masked
skull cackling and then to an extreme closeup of a very fake eyeball with a
skull reflected in the iris and the sound of a woman screaming. This is an attempt to link the artifice with
the actuality, to undercut the “real” world of the film with the elements of
the comic book one. It’s the essence of
Pop art, this creation of “art” from common/trash/low culture
images/elements. The same can be said,
to some extent, of the television series over which everyone is getting
whacked. Yet more than that, I like the
idea of life imitating art and the intermingling of the two. The comic strip character begat the
television series that begat the murderer, and the three interact with each
other as reflections on one another. The
comic was a commercial endeavor. The
television show is a commercial endeavor.
The murderer takes the fictitious character (from both the strip and the
show) and uses her methods in real life.
That said, I thought of Corrado
Farina’s Baba Yaga several times
while watching Sexy Cat. Both are adaptations of comics. Both have metatextual components. But the former actually succeeds in blending
the different mediums and saying something about art and reality, whereas the
latter just goes through the motions, again accentuating its imitation status.
**MINOR SPOILERS TO
FOLLOW**
All that aside, this film is
hollow. The narrative is structured
around Mike interviewing various characters (some of whom he bangs, some of
whom he doesn’t), and the interviewees giving out explanations and information
so convoluted as to be nonsensical. In
between, we get sequences of Sexy Cat killing people and Lieutenant Cole (Mariano Vidal Molina) gesticulating and
pitching epic fits of overreaction (the latter are actually kind of fun). The problem is there is absolutely no weight
to anything that’s going on. Mike meets
an actress from the television series, and they immediately sleep with one
another. After being set up to make us
think she’ll play a large part in the story, she’s killed. Mike has an interview scheduled with a
character who should have important information (and who, we can assume, would
likely sleep with him), but she never gets to give any of this information up
(to either Mike or the audience) before being killed after proving through the
brevity of her time onscreen her worthlessness to the film and its story. In fact, that’s pretty much the purpose for
which every female character in this film exists; to die violently so the
camera can leer at them. There’s nothing
especially wrong with that under certain circumstances (I can vaguely recall
the personalities [slim as they may have been] of most of the victims in films
like Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street), but here they’re
nothing more than warm bodies turning cold.
Worse, the ultimate reveal of the murderer’s identity and motivation is
not only dumb but is obvious three seconds after the culprit first appears
onscreen in civilian identity. The
supposed ingannation is transparent, like Mike’s libido (the only thing he
seems any interest in getting to the bottom of, barring, possibly, a bottle of
hooch). Like so much else about Sexy Cat, its resolution only made me
think about other, better films with similar themes.
MVT: The Pop art,
self-reflexive bits intrigued me. Their
execution bored me.
Make or Break: Mike
interviews a woman who used to have the rights to the Sexy Cat property, and the woman talks and talks and talks so much
that it finally dawned on me that everything being said meant nothing about anything,
and that this applied to the rest of the film, as well.
Score: 5/10