US Catman: Lethal Track 1990

Over this past weekend I tried my hand at a twelve hour superhero movie marathon. But not just any superhero movies, I chose some of the worst that I happened to still own having bought them to review right here on this site. While I didn’t quite make it twelve hours, we did manage to watch seven movies going nearly eleven hours. And as luck would have it, the first movie that we watched was this one. This is a movie that I’ve had on my big superhero movie list since nearly the beginning despite still knowing next to nothing about it over ten years later. And yet, when I was browsing some used DVDs and I saw it within the past several months, I just had to pick it up. And technically, it is a superhero movie, or at least 1/3 of it is. The movie cuts back and forth between two completely unrelated story lines. One of them is the Catman story, and I’m guessing that the other is the Lethal Track story. There is zero intersection between the two and the cuts are completely arbitrary. It’s an extremely low budget martial arts film that I’m guessing was filmed in Taiwan or Hong Kong and has a bad English dub that includes a swear word in practically every sentence. But in the context of watching it for a streaming marathon, it was a blast.

The Catman portion of the storyline follows a police officer and his buddy that end up fighting a small group of drug addicts near a van that has radioactive waste and a cat in a cage. His buddy gets scratched by the cat and the next day he’s able to turn his TV and lights by pointing at them and is able to light the police officer’s cigarette just by looking at it. For some reason they are going after this satanic church of Cheever led by a guy who also seems to have some powers like being able to light a fire with his cane. In the next scene of this story line, he shows up wearing goggles with a cat logo, a T-shirt with the same cat logo, and a black cape. There’s also a ridiculous gag when they have a close up of the newspaper where he apparently put an ad in the paper asking if you need your cigarette lit. The fight scenes are silly, and the church scenes make absolutely no sense. Cheever acts like they’re a satanic cult trying to sacrifice this woman who is tied up, but when Catman and friend try to rescue her, she is still fully on the side of the Church of Cheever. There’s also a running gag where the two guys ask a homeless man for information which he gives them only after they agree to buy him food from the local 7 eleven, and they later run into the same homeless man wearing a wig which is never explained. It’s also worth noting that in this section of the movie, that homeless man is pretty much the only Asian actor, while the majority of the cast are white.

Meanwhile, the completely separate story line involves a group of bandits led by a bald, eyepatch wearing Bull who is one of only about three characters in this segment that definitely have a name. They capture a military general and the rest of this segment is extremely hard to follow as it jumps around from character to character and it’s very difficult to follow which side each person is on. The only other significant character who also is named is Frederick who plays a woman posing as a man. And yet in the dub she is voiced by a very clearly female voice actor, though the vast majority of other characters refer to her as a man. At least until they don’t. Frederick seems to just be some random punk on a dirt bike causing trouble, and yet she ends up involved with the group of people trying to free the general from the bandits.

The rest of the plot is practically pointless to try and describe because it was all either bonkers or just didn’t make any sense as to what was going on. There seemed to be some intentional comedy, especially with Frederick and on the Catman side of things, but there also seemed to be an intent to craft an actual movie somewhere along the way. The various fight scenes had some effort put into them, but the editing and filmmaking made it exceptionally difficult to follow what was going on. It also didn’t help that the DVD was in 4:3 format, but it’s likely that it was filmed in widescreen and there was no effort made to pan and scan, the frame was just cut off at the sides which created several shots where both people talking to each other were halfway cut off.

In terms of a so bad it’s good film, there is a lot to enjoy here, from the ridiculousness of Catman gaining his powers by literally getting scratched by a radioactive cat, to the absurdity of an obvious woman that no one else can tell is a woman, to the film just randomly jumping back and forth between two stories that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The fights are a mess, the dub is typical 70’s or 80’s era Hong Kong that nowhere near match the lip movements, practically none of the characters have names or motivations, but if you’re in the mood for a cheesy martial arts movie that makes no sense, you could do a lot worse than Catman in Lethal Track. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.