Movie Review // Catnado (2022)

 

When you find a certain movie subgenre (in this case it's the -nado in Sharknado) and it works, then I'll just keep watching movies in it.   The thing about a movie like "Catnado" is that it seems easy enough, for a lower budget film, to get footage of cats based on people having cats and constantly putting them across the internet but also the scenes where a cat is used in a manner which might harm an actual cat you can clearly see a stuffed in its place.   There is in fact one scene in here where a "cat" (clearly plush) attacks a guy and another guy shoots the cat.  But as the cat is thrown to the ground, you can see the blood stain appear underneath it.  You can very clearly tell no cats were harmed in the making of this film.

I went into "Catnado" thinking it would be like "Sharknado" but with cats and in that sense it would have a Point A to Point B type of plot line.  However, this is actually a number of smaller pieces of the film put together to create one film.  As is explained in the beginning, this is the experience of the "Catnado" as told through the eyes of those who experienced it, so it's not just a few main characters, but everyone has their own little version of it.  This was an interesting approach to it because it gave us some different perspectives from characters but also there were different writers/directors as well.

My favorite of all of these shorts based on the name alone is "Apocalypse Meow", but my favorite short because of how it plays out is called "Storm Window".  In this, the only human character you'll see represents the idea of sticking out a storm (a tornado of any kind) by staying inside and as such cats not only begin showing up inside of the house but they also begin talking to him.  While other shorts within the overall film can have lots of meowing and just the violence of cat scratches (some of which come off in a POV way of the cats, which is great) I think that "Storm Window" is the more psycological approach to being in a storm.

If "Catnado" was simply a film where a few people got together and ran around, trying to avoid this main title disaster, it would feel a lot like the tag line says.  The way that this was instead broken up into pieces, giving different voices and perspectives to the overall plot just feels like the type of twist (no pun intended) that this genre needed.  "Catnado" takes an existing idea and makes it better.   It can also just feel like a better chance for this to have multiple watches because you can go back and watch again for specific segments or just talk with others who might enjoy this film about which segment is your favorite.   Overall though, it's just a bunch of fun and it has cats.