Catastrophic Performances

Why do film makers persist in casting real cats as, well, cats in films?  I mean, they are just about the worst actors I've ever come across - unless they are trying to persuade that they haven't been fed, when they can give Oscar-worthy performances which convince you that they might actually like you.  But on film, they are resolutely poor actors.  Today, for instance, I had the misfortune to catch part of Funeral Home again, the sequence near the beginning when our heroine, walking to her new home, encounters a cat.  She's supposed to find the approaching feline menacing - the problem being that the cat playing the part approaches in a bouncy manner with its tail up: a clear sign that it is being friendly.  It doesn't look the least evil or menacing.  There are similar problems with the 'star' of Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat (1981), which spends the entire film wandering around tail up, blinking the camera and looking as if he is about to fall asleep under the hot lighting rigs.  It rather undermines the premise that the creature is somehow possessed by evil.  In the one scene were the cat 'acts' by reaching up with his front paws to operate a door knob, it is obvious that he has been bribed by smearing something edible on the door knob - you can see him licking it, for God's sake.

Eye of the Cat (1969) features ensemble non-acting from a whole horde of cats - the only time they get aggressive is when they are forced to fight over some meat.  Actually, Eye of the Cat is interesting because it does feature one cat that has clearly been trained to perform some actions on cue.  He plays multiple roles, in that he's electrocuted on his first appearance, but apparently returns from the dead (or is it just an identically marked cat?) to further menace the cat-phobic protagonist.  This cat even gets his own, individual, credit on the closing titles.  Mind you, I don't blame cats, in general, for not co-operating in the making of these films - after all, they all pursue the anti-cat agenda all too common in cinema, whereby felines are depicted as being creatures of evil.  Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows that they aren't evil - lazy, untrustworthy and entirely self centred, yes.  But not actually evil.  Being evil would require too much energy, which cats are loathe to waste.  It always irritates me the way in which, by contrast, dogs are invariably portrayed in film as being loyal, intelligent and resourceful.  The reality is that they are four-legged shitting machines that follow orders blindly.  Everyone surely knows that the only good dog is a dead dog.  (That latter statement is guarantee to wind up dog lovers).   So yeah, stop this anti-cat propaganda or, at the very least, give the ones you use in films acting lessons.