Hong Kong cinema in the 1990s produced some truly gonzo movies, and perched near the top of any legitimate list of such achievements—much like its namesake animal—is Ngai Choi Lam’s The Cat (Lo mau). This sci-fi / fantasy / horror / murder mystery hybrid is comically grotesque, narratively bizarre, and immensely entertaining. Barely a lick of it makes conventional sense, but that isn’t what one looks for when watching a movie like this. Rather, one waits with rapt anticipation for just how nutty it can get, and in that sense it does not disappoint.

The cat of the title is not an animal at all, but rather an alien in furry feline form, as is its owner, who takes the form of a young girl named Princess (Gloria Yip) who is travelling with yet another alien in human form named Errol (Lau Siu-Ming). They are trying to get back to their home planet, which requires retrieving a strange octagonal object that is being held in a museum. Their endeavors are constantly stymied by the presence of another alien, one that does not always disguise its hideous natural form, but rather revels in it. This other alien, which variously looks like an enormous mass of fungus, exposed entrails, or just a big reddish blob, shows up at all the wrong times and is also capable of taking over human bodies, which it does to police inspector Wang Chieh-Mei (Phillip Kwok).

The ostensible protagonist of the film is a mystery writer named Wisely (Waise Lee), who, along with his girlfriend, Pak So (Christine Ng), gets involved in the plight of the aliens via their mutual friend, Tung (Lawerence Lau). Unbeknownst to me when I first watched the film, Wisely is a well-known recurring character in a series of books and stories by prolific Hong Kong novelist Ni Kuang. And when I say prolific, I mean prolific: Between 1963 and his death in 2002, Ni published 145 novels featuring Wisely, which spawned eight films and five television series between 1983 and 2018 (interestingly, the character has never been played by the same actor twice). Not having seen any of the other Wisley films, I cannot comment definitively, but I have a hard time imagining that any of them are as off-the-wall bonkers as The Cat.

It is also notable that The Cat is predominantly a science fiction film with its aliens, talk of distant stars, and fantastical technologies, since that genre had never been particularly popular in Hong Kong. However, The Cat is typical to the degree that it merges science fiction with other generic tropes, thus offering something for just about anyone under the sun (except those who demand logic and coherence in their movies). Director / cinematographer Ngai Choi Lam, who is a much revered figure in cult film circles, was nearing the end of his brief career, having started with comedies in the early 1980s before finding his voice with increasingly bizarre genre films such as the self-explanatory Erotic Ghost Story (Liu jai yim taam, 1990) and his final film, the notoriously gory kung-fu / action-comedy Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (Lik wong, 1991).

While the film moves in fits and starts, lurching sometimes awkwardly between outright comedy, gross-out horror, and John Woo-esque ballets of gunfire, it offers a number of stand-out sequences, each of which holds up in its own right even if it doesn’t necessarily gel with the rest of the film. Chief among these is the much-discussed junkyard battle between the titular cat and a dog that is recruited from an eccentric millionaire (played by source novelist Ni Kuang). All pretense toward anything that might be deemed realistic is gleefully chucked out the window in this feline-canine smackdown, which employs every visual trick in the book and then some. Much of it is simply cleverly edited footage of the cat and dog running and jumping and hissing and swiping, but when that isn’t enough, we get puppetry, optical work, and even some quick stop-motion animation. Like the rest of the film, it is a deliriously whacked-out sequence that feels both absurdly amateurish and vibrantly confident.

Copyright © 2025 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © 88 Films