One from the Vaults: Whiskers

There's a delightful feature with my cable called On-Demand. Most people use it to catch up on TV shows they've missed, not realizing that a delightful treasure trove of crap lies just within their reach. The free movies section is a grandiose collection of 80s horror, 70s exploitation, and simply uncategorizable head scratchers.

Whiskers falls into the last category. It's a Canadian made for TV kids movie about a boy whose cat best friend turns into a creepy man in a hoodie through the power of love and pagan idol worship. On the surface, it's your average talking animal movie, complete with clueless parents and musical numbers. You'll need to dig deeper for its true horrors.

Whiskers tells the tale of an emotionally stunted little boy named Jeb, who is on the fast track to Norman Batesville because he can't connect to people his age and can only talk to his cat Whiskers. In fact, he's pretty darn obsessed with cats in general. His parents, who have already voiced their opinion that their kid is a nutjob, try to tell him - SPOILER ALERT - that he's going to have a little sister. Somehow the kid processes this as "We're going to get rid of Whiskers, chump," and freaks out.

While at a cat museum with his dad, the kid makes a wish on a statue of the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet to turn Whiskers into a Real Boy so he could still be with his BFF. Bastet makes some 90s CGI happen, and the next day, Whiskers is human! Only problem is Whiskers has aged in cat years, so while Jeb was expecting a boy his age, Whiskers has become a 30 year old man in a brown hoodie.

So Whiskers teaches Jeb all the typical kids movie crap - how to have fun, make friends, and confront bullies - and even has a musical interlude with the world's 2nd catchiest white boy jazz song about cats as Whiskers introduces Jeb to his cat homies. Jeb, meanwhile, has to help Whiskers find his mother in a B plot that suddenly appears when the movie should be over.

Brent Carver, the actor playing People Whiskers, won a Tony for Kiss of the Spider Woman, so either he really believes in this project or has some gambling debt to pay. I hope it's the latter, because the former raises some serious eyebrows. Sure, any kids' movie with a person playing an animal is going to be awkward, but unlike Quigley, which had Gary Busey pretending to be a dog by acting like Gary Busey, this awkwardness gets into creepy territory. Whiskers ends up next to Jeb in bed too many times for me to be entirely comfortable with this movie. And unlike the parents in Goobie, who just seemed negligent with their psychotic son's maladies, these parents seem to take some kind of unnatural glee in fucking with their kid's head.

I can't recall as much batshit crazy stuff from this movie as I'd like, and I'm afraid I can't reference you to a place where you can see it. The internet only has faint traces of it - I couldn't even find a poster for it -and Amazon simply knows it exists. I just assumed it was a fever dream until I found screen caps.

This is the epitomy of the crappy sort of programming from On Demand, which is why you need to scope it out. In the words of Cinderella (the metal band, not the kids' movie), you don't know whatcha got til it's go-o-one. I doubt they were talking about Whiskers, but it applies well enough here.