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30%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #14,303
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Ben Gerick is a rising star for a major corporate law firm. By day he dresses in a smart business suit, but at home he takes on a new persona...that of Catalina - A super hero transvestite.
--IMDb
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Review by Ginose
Added: April 1, 2010
I... I don't even really know where to begin with this film. "Catalina: A New Kind of Superhero" is, hands-down, one of the strangest films I have ever seen in my life. This is a film that I can, for the first time in a long time, say transcends genres in the most structurally unstable, yet still functioning way you're ever liable to see... and I'm unsure as to what to make of it all.
Well, the plot goes a bit like this:
General Killgrath the Negative beats down a warpath through most of the known galaxy on his quest for Thrixium, a power-generating metal for use in his planet-crushing meta-weapons. Upon his most recent assault on a peaceful planet, his reign of chaos is brought to an end by one lone monk with a bomb in his possession. Finally apprehended, the general is sentenced to a prehistoric planet, where he would die in exile, his army, hopefully, left to dissolve without their leadership. This all goes awry (of course) when Killgrath's fleet attack his prison transport, forcing them to land, in hibernation on Earth.
Meanwhile, Ben, an up-and-comer at his law-firm, has just become trapped in his own web of lies, stuck between his own, successful life and the deeper, honest person he wants to be. After being caught in drag by his long-time girlfriend, Ben poses as his "never mentioned" sister Catalina. With that scrape just barely making it by, he ventures to the local park where he comes across the downed spaceship (minus the escaped Killgrath), the surviving pilot/guard draws "Catalina" closer and forces the orb of Thrixium gathered on the transport into "her" chest, investing the power and, nay the fate of the known universe in "her" capable hands.
Now, when I read the premise regarding a story about a transvestite super-hero with alien-given superpowers I smiled. This could have been a laugh-riot, however I was both disappointed and pleasantly surprised by the amount of class that was used in not exploiting the concept. See, all of the matters regarding Ben's passion is handled with more tact than I ever could have imagined, plenty of drama shed in how it affects his life and it's rarely the butt of any jokes, throughout. I'd also like the take a particular note and compliment the rather excellent visual effects; making a gratuitous space-battle on a budget is hard work and, though the sound-design was downright terrible, at times, the visuals were damn fun to watch and didn't come off as terribly underwhelming anywhere.
Now that I've gotten through the good, here's the meat of the matter: the script.
Now, what I typed a bit above... eh... well, that IS the plot, but to explain all of the shit that happens in this movie's 90-minute run time would take many, many more paragraphs, as I can't even begin to weave in some of the wild bullshit that happens in this flick. It honestly felt like four (possibly five) different movies were written and, then, it was realized that the two zeros at the end of the budget WERE actually separated by a decimal.
I don't mean this to be a negative thing, so much, as a practical thing: why try to film five movies on a small budget, limited time-frame and, for that matter, as the same film? "Catalina" may be one of the stories in this movie, but when we learn of the super-intelligent brothers who've worked to turn the younger, ill brother into a half-computer half-man, the MPD suffering terrorist on Interpol's most wanted list, and the utterly DYING to be known space-war epic featured in the first 25 or so minutes, we (or definitely I) start to wonder where I'm suppose to attach to the story and try to get a gist of the overall project.
I've read that the space-war story was definitely the original project, but time-restraints forced the director's hand, so he made "Catalina" to pick-up what there was left of the story after that portion was abruptly ended. This is ridiculously obvious. However, I'm not sure why he saw it necessary to add all of the supporting characters he did and, above most else, the rather ingenious "Mainframe" story to the mix. It's almost like he was afraid to turn all of these ideas into films of their own, rather than compensating for his restraints on the project. Maybe he didn't think he'd be able to MAKE all of these stories, sure, fine and good, but would it have hurt the movie so terrible much simply to add the transvestite-superhero story as the clincher and continuation to the space-epic? I mean, all it did was bloat the story to near brain-blistering levels of complexity with no REAL depth to speak of. Hell, THIS ended up being with absolute worst thing about the movie. Well, that and the atrocious ending, where every single loose-end and possible sequel stepping point is destroyed utterly for no clear reason whatsoever... it's just offensive to see a movie ended so shamelessly.
It's a terrible shame, really, it's a well-made movie. For the most part, it's an entertaining movie, it's definitely endearing and has a lot of heart at its core, it's just not a GOOD movie. It fails too miserably at telling a story for me to even want to consider it a good film, for all the good, successful bits that this feature has to offer, the fact that I was groaning at every break-away in the plot that turned out to connect to it all in the loosest, most indefinitely pointless ways far, FAR too often tells me that a story is far more important to a film that just about anything else. It always has been, but it took a movie like "Catalina" to show me that even low-budget, indie flicks can be guilty of this.
3.8/10.
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#1:
Ginose
- added April 1, 2010 at 2:30pm
...wow, I just realized how atrociopus that cover
is.
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