After a brief podcast hiatus, we are back to the low budget 80s goodness for the week. I had actually heard about The Uninvited before this as being noteworthy in its badness. Which, of course, meant that as soon as I saw that it was available to watch; I had to get that shit on the playlist immediately. I couldn’t remember exactly what the plot of the movie was and I’m so glad because it manages to somehow be both completely ridiculous and yet also so goddamn boring. Hooray!

The movie centers around some college kids on spring break in Ft. Lauderdale that end up getting on a criminal’s yacht. Once out to sea, the boat breaks down and they are picked off by the monster of the film, a cat. Not just any cat, though. This one has the ability to barf out a another, different cat that is somehow bigger than the original cat and it is also super strong and has a bite that infects you with a deadly mutation where you start producing so much blood that you die. There’s kind of a lot going on with the cat in this movie and I sort of wish this was a podcast episode just so I could really try to unpack all of it. It’s also worth noting that the monster cat is the worst looking puppet ever but the rest of the time the regular cat is just some fat, orange tabby that has a meow track looped endlessly whenever it is on screen.

The actual villain of the movie is, of course, capitalism. The yacht everyone is dying on belongs to Walter, a rich guy that has done something nebulously illegal (insider trading?) and now has a ton of money in an account in the Caymans. In order to get that money, he needs to actually, physically go to the Caymans. He invites two random girls he finds to come along as a cover story for…something? The two random girls then invite three random guys along and pick up a stray cat they find in a dumpster. I’m not sure why they think this random rich guy is going to go along with this and he doesn’t at first but apparently the entire yacht crew quit and he needs to leave before the SEC finds him, so he hires them as a new crew. Basically everyone in this movie is kind of an idiot/asshole except the yacht captain and the third-wheel guy that came along.

A venomous mutant cat that barfs up a different cat that is a hilariously shitty puppet that kills assholes might seem like a slam dunk of a movie but it gets really bogged down in the fact that they are stuck on a boat. We get a lot of scenes of bad actors sitting around a yacht complaining about things in between sweet monster puppet scenes. Probably the best thing in the movie to me is that at the end, the two non-assholes manage to escape the yacht using the life boat. The life boat that has been there the whole time. That nobody else thought to use until the yacht was literally sinking. They make it to the Caymans in that boat, by the way.

The movie isn’t really good enough that I would say it is one you would want to just sit down and watch but I could definitely see this as a good background horror movie when you have friends over so you can make fun of it. I’d give it a 2.5 out of 5.