June 23-29 Cat Week: Cats! They’re earth’s funniest creatures (sorry chimps, you’re psychos).

I’m trying to answer this cat movie challenge, so I went to Tubi, where I found this movie and its description: “When Dana moves into her new apartment, she falls in love with the building’s cat, who happens to be a grown woman in a costume.”

I have to tell you, this movie is excellent, because it’s someone’s particular fantasies shot on green screen and playing on Tubi. If that doesn’t make you want to watch this, does the fact that a character directly shouts out that they are making a movie for Tubi? And if not, why are you reading this?

Scott Hillman also made The Magical Christmas Tree, a movie that is also about an elf, non-gender-specific people finding love and not as much the holidays.  This movie? It’s about Dana (Natalie Cotter) moving into a new apartment building and learning that there’s a cat person (Fawn Williams) who lives there. One day, the cat gets into her house, and she pets her, which strangely gets her obsessed with human/cat consensual BDSM play. The movie in no way judges this, which is excellent! Whatever! Is it love? Maybe! There’s also a binary person, Max Power, played by Socks Whitmore, who is never questioned for who they are; they’re a vital and essential character.

The Cat is also The Bear, a superheroine who was once Sgt. Lori Levy was given animal DNA by a government agency. She ‘s also able to speak and be charming to Dana’s mom, who is Lisa London, Rocky from Savage Beach! Somehow, all the weird comic book moments pay off by the end, too.

This has some green screen that must be seen to be believed, and sound that can barely qualify as mixed. Who cares? This is the purest film I’ve seen in a long time. Man, Cotter and Winters are really good in it. It’s a brave, raw, weird movie. I’m so glad I watched it. Don’t be one of those people put off by how all over the place it feels. Stay with it. Let it breathe.

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 23-29 Cat Week: Cats! They’re earth’s funniest creatures (sorry chimps, you’re psychos).

I saw this at the drive-in, a second feature with something else that I can’t remember, but you don’t forget a movie in which a not far from being cancelled Kevin Spacey plays Tom Brand, a workaholic tycoon who becomes a cat.

Yes, he’s also married to Jennifer Garner, so all is well in his world, even if he rarely sees her. He’s too busy building the biggest builder ever or something. He gets his daughter Rebecca (Malina Weissman) a cat to make up for almost forgetting her birthday, buying it from the strange pet store of Felix Perkins (Christopher Walken). As he learns another building will be taller than his, he is blown off the roof and isn’t saved by his assistant Ian (Mark Consuelos). Tom goes to the hospital, near death, but his mind is inside Mr. Fuzzypants.

Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who was the cinematographer of Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and Misery, but also directed the Men In Black movies and Get Shorty, not to mention Wild Wild West. Somehow, this was the last movie he would direct. Somehow, this took five writers: Gwyn Lurie, Matt R. Allen, Caleb Wilson, Daniel Antoniazzi and Ben Shiffrin.

But at least Lil Bub was in it.

June 23-29 Cat Week: Cats! They’re earth’s funniest creatures (sorry chimps, you’re psychos).

Directed by Scott Perry, who wrote it with Grace Smith, this has two guys — a hitchhiker, Ralph (Dave Cox) and a cat exterminator, Warren (Gary Graves)  — up against an Egyptian god who turns cats into human women all set to procreate and take over the world.

Made for Cinemax, this has people dressed as cats, The Great Litter being the name for the end of the world, and yeah, it’s a Troma movie, so it wastes that great title without being interesting or funny. More fun to make than watch, I think.

June 23-29 Cat Week: Cats! They’re earth’s funniest creatures (sorry chimps, you’re psychos).

Why did I watch this? Well, look at the directors and you can pick out the ones I would be obsessed by: Curtis Everitt, Donald Farmer, Alaine Huntington, Blair Kelly, James M. Myers, Melvin Pittman, Tim Ritter, Jerry Williams and Logan Winton.

That’s right, Farmer and Ritter.

I mean, even on the line that describes it on IMDB, it doesn’t even make the effort: It’s like Sharknado, but with cats.

It’s also an anthology as so much microbudget horror seems to be these days. I mean, cats do abuse a priest in it, so there’s that. I imagine there;s a YouTube category for that. I do have a weakness for stuff like this, usually if it has a Ouija board or is in Amityville or has a shark, but I’m trying to do this cat movie challenge and how many Garfield movies can one man watch?

I expected nothing from this and was awarded in abundence.

The cover looks nice, the actual cartoon isn’t all that horrible, and cats are always fun to watch. There, I’ve said a few nice things. At least everyone got paid.

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years?

Howard Deutch directed two other films for John Hughes — who wrote this — Pretty In Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful. He also came from advertising before movies; he also directed the videos for “Flesh for Fantasy” by Billy Idol, Billy Joel’s “Keeping the Faith” and the movies Grumpier Old Men, The Odd Couple II, and a movie playing on cable right now as you read this, The Replacements. I also am forever jealous of him, as he’s married to Lea Thompson.

Chester “Chet” Ripley (John Candy) has brought his wife Connie (Stephanie Faracy) and son Buck (Chris Young), and Benny (Ian Giatti) is taking a break and heading off to their cabin in Pechoggin, Wisconsin. Chet doesn’t realize that he’s sharing it with his wife’s brother, Roman Craig (Dan Aykroyd), his wife Kate (Annette Bening) and their twin daughters Cara and Mara (Hilary and Rebecca Gordon). Chet hates Roman, who is always selling something, always has an angle and looks down on his working-class life. Why have hot dogs when you can have lobster? That’s how Roman looks at it.

This is a hijinks ensue movie. You don’t need to know much more of the plot other than you can turn this on during a lazy Sunday and your favorite part will be moments away, like The ’96er Steak Challenge, the legend of Jody the Bald-Headed Bear, the talking racoons and so much more. It’s dependable.

The funny thing is that the girls were almost abducted by a giant fish, which was built but didn’t work, so the bear was the substitute.

The audience first saw Roman, Chet and Buck in She’s Having a Babywhen they appeared in character trying to come up with a name for the titular child.

June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??

The Groove Tube comes from SOV sketches that were shown at the Channel One Theater on East 60th St. in New York. They took the best sketches on tour and whatever ones got the greatest reaction on college campuses were reshot on film and then put into this movie.

It starts with a 2001 recreation of the apes meeting a TV set. Then, music supervisor Buzzy Linhart plays a hitchhiker; director and writer Ken Shapiro plays Koko the Clown, who reads Fanny Hill as part of Make Believe Time; Chevy Chase and adult star Jennifer Welles (Abigail Leslie Is Back In Town, Inside Jennifer Welles) in a Geritol parody; a news program that has Shapiro playing Indira Ghandi in brownface; the International Sex Games, which has adult stars Paul Norman (who directed the Bi and Beyond series) and Rebecca Brooke, who was in Chuck Vincent’s Grace’s Place as well as several Joe Sarno films like Confessions of a Young American Housewife and Little Girl, Big Tease and Chase and Shapiro singing “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.” Oh yeah — Richard Belzer is here and in blackface.

“Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow” was later used by Chevy Chase on Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live, although he doesn’t say the line in this. Shapiro would go on to work with Chase again, as he directed and wrote Modern Problems. Co-writer Lane Sarasohn would go on to work on Not Necessarily the News and Chevy Chase’s first post-SNL special and the other co-writer, Rich Allan, also worked with Shapiro and Sarasohn on a series of films that would be collected in 2024’s Poems Without Words.

Like most comedy anthologies other than Kentucky Fried Movie and Amazon Women On the Moon, this is an uneven mix of sketches. However, I laughed a bunch anyway.

Oh, and an aside: Shapiro started his entertainment career as Kenny Sharpe on live television and appeared often on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater as “The Kid” and on George Scheck’s Star Time Kids Show with Connie Francis. His assistant in Hollywood, back in the 1970s, was Gus Van Sant. I almost spelled his name Gus Van Zandt because I like thinking about the director of the bootleg Psycho being in Lynyrd Skynyrd.

You can download The Groove Tube from the Internet Archive.

June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??

I hate saying people are nepo babies to the point that, of course, I did it right in the first sentence. But yeah, Please Don’t Destroy are Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy and of them, only Marshall doesn’t have famous parents. Higgins’ dad is Steve Higgins, producer of SNL and Jimmy Fallon’s announcer, as well as the nephew of Chris Elliot and actor David Anthony Higgins. Herlihy is the son of Tim, Adam Sandler’s longtime writing partner and a former SNL producer. They got together in 2017 and, within just four years, ended up as writers on SNL, writing digital shorts. She’s not the only person with a family history at the show, as Jane Wickline’s mother, Marcy Hardart, was Lorne Michaels’ assistant, and her father, Matt, was a writer on Letterman and In Living Color.

I mean, I guess you can come from anywhere and be funny. Whether or not SNL is funny is up to you.

Ben, John and Martin are the names the guys use in this, and they’re all growing away from one another. Ben is taking over Trout Plus, the family store, from his father (Conan O’Brien). At the same time, Martin has found religion and a girlfriend who goes by Amy (Nichole Sakura). John is about to be left behind, so he decides to make a break to Foggy Mountain to find a treasure — Jean Pierre La Roche’s bust of Marie Antoinette — that everyone is looking for, like park rangers Lisa (Megan Stalter) and Taylor (X Mayo) and the cult of Deetch Nordwind (Bowen Yang), who have been looking for it for perhaps a decade.

Funny moments:

• Gaten Matarazzo of Stranger Things is killed by a cult
• Martin goes full-on action hero and has a weird Italian accent.
• The fact that the music seems trapped in the mid-2000s.
• The non-nepo baby is the fictional nepo baby.

Truly, this is the kind of movie that people who think I should watch something would send me, and I’m not being elitist here. I mean, I watch SNL every week knowing it sucks, so what taste do I have? I mean, I like the Lonely Island movies and these guys feel like, well, the kids who watched Lonely Island on YouTube and decided to do i. Still, alsoo they had rich dads, like the dude I used to work for whose son works in his company who hated the sons of people who owned companies when he was young and now he’s old and his son is a wash out and barely wants to work, but he’s his son, dammit. What do I know? My son is a 3-pound dog that I hope outlives me, and I can’t teach him how to be a writer. Comedy feels half ass today and I’m saying that as someone who finds the dumbest and worst teen sex comedies uproarious. The bar is low, and this is fine. It’s fine. I’m trying to convince myself, not you. You can do whatever you want.

I mean, is a Soulja Boy needledrop so funny that you have to do it three times really that funny?

June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??

Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer are Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins and Derek Smalls, but they’re also Alan Barrows, Jerry Palter and Mark/Marta Shubb. They first appeared on Saturday Night Live’s Season 10, episode 4, on November 3, 1984, when Guest and Shearer were in the cast and McKeen was hosting. I have no idea why Shearer would come back to SNL, as no one is more ruthless about the show in the Live from New York book.

Here’s a good Shearer quote: “I grew to quite loathe the producer of the show. The first words he said to me were, “I never hired a male Jew for the show before.” And knowing that he was Jewish gave it an extra tang.”

Anyways, that sketch — Shearer came back post-Lorne Michaels, I get it — “The Folksmen Reunion” was all about how America was into old folk musicians getting back together. The band also shows up in The Return of Spinal Tap and actually opened for itself, kind of, as The Folksmen opened for Spinal Tap, which didn’t always work out well, if you ask Guest, who told Wired, “One time, we had The Folksmen open for Spinal Tap because we always wanted to do a culmination of our entirely different personas. So there we were in caps playing folk music, opening for Spinal Tap, and the audience looked completely bewildered, like “What the fuck is going on here?” It was great. My son was at the show, and asked, “Mom, when are the old guys getting off and loud guys coming on?” That may have been a moment of weirdness for some people, but so what?”

They also played an actual folk festival alongside Arlo Guthrie, Joni Mitchell and Peter, Paul & Mary.

Anyway, The Folksmen started at The Twobadors, as Shubb and Barrows met at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont—or did all three members go to Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio—and met Palter in Greenwich Village. After their single “Old Joe’s Place,” they somehow released five albums in 26 months before breaking up, forever known as “the group who were too popular to be purist and too purist to be popular.”

At some point, Mark became Mary — saying “After that concert (the one in this movie) I realized I want to spend as much of the rest of my life as possible playing folk music with these gentlemen. And I want to spend all of it as a woman. I came to a realization that I was, and am, a blonde, female folk singer trapped in the body of a bald, male folk singer, and I had to let me out or I would die.” — and they really did become Peter, Paul and Mary. Or Marta.

Sometimes, the silliest jokes are the best.

As for the movie, when their manager Irving Steinbloom dies, The Folksmen join up with The New Main Street Singers — led by George Menschell (Paul Dooley), who can’t play the guitar he carries, along with Terry Bohner (John Michael Higgins), his wife and former adult star, now a witch named Laurie (Jane Lynch) and Sissy Know (Parker Posey — and the folk duo Mitch (Eugene Levy) and Mickey (Catherine O’Hara) for a memorial concert.

Directed by Guest, who co-wrote it with Levy, this movie has almost everyone—well, not George Menschell—play their own instruments. Levy even learned to play guitar just for the film.

While not my favorite of the Guest mockumentaries, I still laughed throughout this movie. Maybe it’s because my heart is in metal, and I strongly feel these lyrics: “Working on a sex farm / Trying to raise some hard love / Getting out my pitchfork / Poking your hay.”

June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??

The magazine National Lampoon did a stage show that came out of the radio show. Directed by Tony Hendra, Michael Keady and Sean Kelly and written by Hendra, Kelly, David Axelrod, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Rhonda Coullet, Christopher Guest, Paul Jacobs, Harold Ramis, Anne Beatts, John Boni, Garry Goodrow, Douglas Kenney, P.J. O’Rourke, Alice Playten and Henry Beard, just from that sentence you’ve already figured out that a lot of SNL people started here.

Starting at The Village Gate on January 25, 1973, this ran for 350 shows. It begins with Belushi coming out to welcome the audience to the Woodshuck Festival: Three Days of Peace, Love and Death. Then, Paul Jacobs from Neverland Express does “Lemmings Lament,” sounding just like David Crosby. Christopher Guest is Dylan singing “Positively Wall Street,” Chevy Chase does John Danver on “Colorado,” Rhonda Coullet is Joan Baez singing “Pull the Tregroes, Negroes” (which has a much worse title); Belushi does Joe Cocker, Guest is James Taylor and there’s even a band named Megadeath years before Megadeth.

Supposedly, this was filmed for HBO — which started in November 1972 — but the tapes were lost.

Most of the acts in this are dead or your parents’ music now. Yet in 1973, this was really going after them and started careers. It’s too bad that Chevy Chase ended up being Chevy Chase.