The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz

This is a film that has been improvised, and you can tell from some of the rather sketchy scenes. Some of the acting comes into its own from this freedom to improvise, and I especially noted the acting of the young Joshua Morrall, who acts the football captain. He really shone through on the screen, and I'm sure that he will blossom into a fine actor. Some of the elder, more accomplished actors seemed a little uncomfortable with the weight of improvising, but all of the characters come out with a lot of depth, and the film comes together very nicely because of it. Overall, I was very pleasantly surprised by this films turnout. I highly recommend it.

Although this movie has the look and feel of something a high school student turned in for his film-making class final project, it is worth watching if you enjoy absurd or surreal vignettes. Make sure you don't expect to get anything meaningful out of it, however. It does poke fun at various elements of society -- I especially liked the "emergency broadcast" talk program on the BBC, which was only slightly more bizarre and irrelevant than most of these talking head programs. The Ouija board scenes were also hilarious. In fact, the more I think about individual scenes, the more I appreciate having stumbled across this film.

During my cinematic explorations I've seen a lot of of far out movies, but The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz has got to be one of the strangest. It's a paranoid yet hilarious film, mixing post-modern end-of-the-world visions with biblical ones. It's one heck of a ride, and though the budget has obviously been quite small, the creators of the film have not let the finances bind their imagination.

In The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz the fair city of London stands on a brink; a solar eclipse is going to darken the skies, and madness begins to emerge. Arcanely dressed Thomas Katz rises from the sewer, and it soon becomes obvious that he is the harbinger (or even the cause) of the chaos to come. The only hope lies in a blind police commander, who is deeply connected with the spirit world. Can he save the white astral child who represents life before Thomas Katz goes through his weird series of metamorphosis, thus sealing the fate of London. And what is Dave going to do about it? What, don't you know who Dave is? Well, he knows who you are, and after you've seen the film you understand why.

When I saw the film the director, Ben Hopkins, was there to present it; he told that much of the dialogue was done by improvisation, and many of the scenes were invented right before they were shot. It's not hard to believe those claims. The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz is not thematical whole; instead it is a series of funny, eerie and surreal scenes portraying the chaos that inhabits our world. While some of these scenes may not work, most of them are, in all their absurdness, scaringly accurate. This clarity of vision covers for the lack of coherence, and makes The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz a worthwhile watch. In it's depiction of irrationality and chaos the film owes much to Luis Buñuel (a debt it openly admits), and it could be even said that this is Buñuel for the post-modern age. Still, the film is highly original in it's own right, and such comparisons should not be taken as claims of plagiarism. Ben Hopkins is not the new Buñuel, but The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz is a film Buñuel would've been proud of.

In the Revelation of St. Peter, it is said that a false Messiah will come, and that Henoch and Elijah will appear to expose the impostor. "The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz" draws heavily on such doomsday stories, canonical as well as apocryphal. A solar eclipse is imminent, the astral child is dying, judgment is coming, and, perhaps worst of all, London's tube stations are disappearing. Enter Thomas Katz, a shape-shifting space alien coughed up by a manhole off the M25 motorway. Under the watchful eyes of London's inscrutable chief of police, Katz takes over a string of high-profile identities to set in motion a vicious plan. But where does it lead? Will it, like the M25, eventually circle back on itself? Only Katz himself knows. Or does he? After all, we don't really know who he even is. Extremely inspired nonsense, miraculously produced by veteran German soap opera writer Hans W. Geissendörfer. Did this ever play in theaters? Too bad if it didn't.

This has to be one of the oddest movies that I ever laughed hysterically at. I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival where half of the people laughed at everything like me, and the other half walked out. If you love insane humor, check it out. That is if it ever gets a distribution contract, which it definitely should. If it does ever come to a rental house near you, instant cult classic status.