Movie Review – Hell’s Kitty

Hell’s Kitty (2018) is a long-form version of a short horror web-series created by Nicholas Tana about the crazy antics of his demonically possessive cat, Angel.

There is sort of a plot involving a girlfriend, a painfully awkward 3-way, an SFX artist. an exorcist, some priests and of course the cat. If you’re trying to figure out how all of these dovetail together, watching this movie won’t help.

I know this will be touted by some as creative and clever especially when done on a seemingly non-existent budget, and no doubt seeing horror movie staples appear on screen is quite the coup for this writer/director, but there is something crucial missing.

Okay, everything is missing.

It reminds me of those adult VHS you could rent from the video stores that have nothing by 4-minute “stories” ending in the same thing? Hell’s Kitty is basically several vignettes of things happening that culminate in someone dying. The problem, much like with the adult VHS, was the build-up to the person dying was less than fleshed out. I don’t know about you, but when I sit down to watch a horror movie, I want to be vested in the characters. Call me crazy, but I’m scared if I care. I’m not sitting down to watch someone die (that’s psychotic). Horror isn’t *just* about the blood and guts and showing off your SPX skills. There needs to be a story, and it needs to be interesting.

Hell’s Kitty doesn’t get interesting until the 00:57:00-minute mark. I swear I’m not kidding, and for a movie that’s only 98 minutes long, that’s a lot of litter to sift through. When Courtney Gains and John Franklin (you know, Malachai and Isaac from Children of the Corn (1984)) show up in full He Who Walks Behind The Rows, things got fun. They’re selling Bibles, because everyone has to make a living, and they encounter a less than receptive Angel. Then there’s an exorcism by Doug Jones and Bill Oberst Jr. (he of my favorite defunct interactive Facebook Connect program Take This Lollipop), then some witches or something, and then a surprise visit by Dale Midkiff as “Rosemary”.

He’s in a corset. Don’t ask.

Look, I think it’s cool that Tana Michael Berryman, Nina Hartley, Adrienne Barbeau, and a bunch of Scream Queen faces doing his series, but it’s not exactly feature-length material, and it could have used still like a script, blocking, pacing, a cameraman, a story, etc.  Even as a web series, it’s lacking a polish someone who works in the industry should be able to provide. Hell’s Kitty comes off as someone’s weekend hobby that someone else took way too seriously. I’m all for passion projects, but comb their hair and put some clothes on your babies before sending them out into the world, okay?

Hell’s Kitty is Unrated but if I had to guess at some parental precautions, I’d firmly plant it at a hard PG-13 for a lot of blood, laughable satanic elements, a forcibly removed tongue, women on woman smooches, gratuitous legs and heels, people dying badly (and I mean, they could have died better because they’re actors), and the unseeable Dale Midkiff in fishnets.