Director: Lewis Teague
Screenplay: Stephen King, based on the short stories "Quitters, Inc." and "The Ledge" by Stephen King
Starring: Drew Barrymore, James Woods, Alan King, Kenneth McMillan, Robert Hays, Candy Clark
Running Time: 94 minutes
Genre: Horror, anthology
Personally I am a huge fan of anthology films. It's a fun idea having a selection of short stories instead of one long narrative, almost like a cinematic buffet. However, like a buffet, the results can be wildly uneven, although if one segment is bad then you don't have to wait too long for something else to appear.
Cat's Eye has the unique, as far as I know, framing device of following the adventures of a plucky cat who is haunted by visions of a girl (Barrymore) begging for help. On his way, however he is captured by an organisation that will go extreme lengths to stop an annoying yuppie (Woods) from smoking, and by an Atlantic City mobster (McMillan) who forces his wife's lover (Hays) to accept a deadly wager: to walk all the way around the narrow ledge outside the mobster's penthouse apartment at the top of a skyscraper. Eventually the cat makes it to the girl and finds himself forced into nightly combat to defend the girl form a tiny monster living in her wall.
This is a fun, lighthearted movie. The first two segments are based on short stories published in King's Night Shift collection (which also supplied the source material for such deathless cinema classics as Children of the Corn (1984), Maximum Overdrive (1986), Graveyard Shift (1990), The Lawnmower Man (1992) and The Mangler (1995)), the third segment was written specifically for the film. "Quitters, Inc." is kind of like a weird dark comedy, which has some fun bits, such as a weird nightmare sequence set to the Police song "Every Breath You Take", and James Woods is pretty good as the jittery would-be ex-smoker. "The Ledge" is a pretty fun, short thriller in the style of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The third story is the only one that features any supernatural elements, and is probably the most typically Stephen King. The monster effects are good, and Drew Barrymore is very good as the little girl.
Cat's Eye is kind of underrated, I think because it doesn't really feature much of the horror that Stephen King is best known for, but there is something here for pretty much anyone. It's suspenseful, creepy at times and at times very funny.
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