Catnado

I'm not going to rag on this movie for being made on a budget of coupons and favors. It's a backyard movie, shot on iPhones, probably using whatever free software they could find for editing and after-effects. These people had an idea, and they saw it through using whatever means they could scrape up. Good for them. But being a backyard movie doesn't have to mean being bad. The Velocipastor is cheap, amateurish, and stupid, and it knows it. It leans into its weaknesses to make them endearing strengths. Catnado does nothing of the sort. It is never funny, not even in a so-bad-it's-good, accidental kind of way. Nobody involved in the writing of these scenes seemed to know how to set up and deliver a joke, or even familiar with what a joke is. One of the seven stories that make up this anthology is just a woman giving an account to the news of witnessing the titular event. The segment is perhaps three minutes long, and nothing happens. The first segment follows two miserable people who flub lines and say "uh" and "um" more often than a nervous eighth grader asking out their crush on a date. They mug a woman and get killed by a catnado. That's it. There's another story about two former brothers-in-law who end up getting trapped together in a house because of the unique weather event. They bicker and have a fist fight because the woman they have in common -- sister to one of them and wife to the other -- killed herself. WHY IS THIS IN MY MOVIE ABOUT CYCLONES WITH KITTIES? Never mind that all this is introduced with a segment that I guess is supposed to be a wrap-around, where it's implied that the movie is found-footage from a world impacted by catnados ... but none of the segments are found footage. Nice continuity there, folks. And that's the other big problem here: the cats. They are almost irrelevant. If you're expecting some Sharknado-style onslaught of flying fluffiness, you will not find it here. Cats themselves are minimal in this movie, let alone catnados. More effort went into making the poster for this movie than went into any scene in the movie. That poster makes a promise the movie is incapable of delivering on. Catnado isn't funny either intentionally or unintentionally, there's way too much drama, very few cats, and almost no entertaining death or destruction. It isn't even worth a watch with friends and some alcohol for riffing. It is that dull and lifeless.