warning: photos and mentions of violence ahead
welp, it also kinda sucks that the first entry of this category happens to be another movie that was a total miss for me, esp bc i just absolutely love found footage horror. fuck it, i love ALL horror, duh lol! butttt this one was. eh, for me personally. it's weird because the hype around this film seemed like... a lot, now that i've finally sat down to watch this movie for the first time. the hooplah was quite a lot for what it ended up actually being 😬
so, Be My Cat. it's a found footage horror movie from Romania and it's just as low-budget as it looks from the beginning. i figured, alright, found footage is great for burgeoning new directors and actors who are looking to break out onto the scene! i think that's what adrian tofei, the lead character and also writer and director of this film was going for, considering he probably wasn't a billionaire with enough cash to throw at a pet project like this. well... looking at the rest of his work, i think that's more fact than assumption.
but like, great. i love b-rated horror movies, i love low budget productions and practical effects. so no biggie! this one took on a similar kinda vibe from the get-go that most other found footage films have, like Blair Witch Project and Creep. this one was just set in the middle of some guy's block in Romania, and from the looks of things, he wasn't exactly in Bucharest or anything.
so we open up the film with a man talking at us through the camera, except... he curiously calls us "anne". okay, that's fine since the movie's literally called a film for anne. but who's anne? why, anne hathaway of course!
he goes on to explain that he is a guy from Romania looking to make a movie. he wrote a script for it, called Be My Cat, since he loves cats so much! and he got the idea to cast anne hathaway in it after seeing her performance as catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises. okay, yeah, that's... hmmm. i mean we get where he's coming from. but the leap in logic from "fledgling director in the middle of bumfuck nowhere Europe" trying to cast one of the most internationally famous and critically acclaimed actresses of this era is... well! it certainly is a choice. but hey, the dude's enthusiastic and he LOVED her in that one batman movie. okay.
this is where the movie starts fraying a little at the seams, which is a great way to let us in on the main character's mindset from the jump. the dude... looks weird, no offense to mr. adrian tofei or anything. he's bald, ugly, has gross yellow teeth that is constantly shoved in our faces thanks to the way he holds the camera and points it at his face... so if adrian doesn't normally look this way and just shaved for this one particular role, great! he did a GREAT job of dressing himself up as a creepy weirdo, because we get hit over the head many many times in the beginning with it.
by the time the guy sits in his home after introducing his mother and his dark room to us, he's rambling about his plans to make this great movie, and he needs a great actress to accomplish it. but for now, he's going to pay to have some anne hathaway lookalikes come over to his home first, film some scenes, and send it over to anne in the hopes of convincing her to come to Romania and fall into his arms... i think.
but things start taking a sinister twist when he has these actresses doing... some strange things in these scenes. you get the idea p quickly with the first girl who pulls up, that this film might not be something he's actually even written at all. his "character" that he plays seems an awful lot like himself, and he immediately starts creeping on this anne hathaway stand-in under the excuse of "okay so this guy. this character that i'm playing. he's obsessed with this actress, who you play. he watches her go up and down the street everyday as she walks to her stage rehearsals. and he watches her because he's so in love with her."
and we as the audience are just supposed to sit here and watch with minimal cuts for like 20 mins as this awkward creepy guy negs this girl, harrasses her repeatedly, gives her confusing and completely contradictory acting directions, and just completely bungles up anything they're trying to do. i sat there wondering if he was just lonely or something, and needed to come up with an excuse to bring girls over, idk. he seemed very incel-y to me
turns out, i was right. kinda. adrian was indeed coming up with a convoluted excuse to film these girls, but it wasn't because he was lonely. well, i mean he was! but he didn't want the company of any of these poor girls. he was in a deeply, deeply, fucked up and all-encompassing parasocial relationship with anne hathaway, but it seemed like he was also into the idea of inviting these girls over for a more sinister reason...
(which are totally spoiled by these photos, sorry y'all LOL)
in my personal opinion, this entire movie seemed... disorganized. i get that it's low-budget, and that we're watching this guy's first film irl as well as the character's first film in tandem, but... idk. i feel like the writing could have been a little better overall with the pacing and the way we're introduced to these actresses at first.
i feel like if the majority of the movie wasn't mostly improv, we could have gotten like... a little less "creep shoves his camera up his nose to monologue" and more action yanno what i mean? i went into this movie with all of the reviews of this being one of the most disturbing found footage horror films out there rattling around in my head. needless to say... i finished it going "what, that's it?!"
again, i get it. super low budget. but like... maybe we could've gotten more scenes that showed, not told. we could've gotten scenes of adrian watching anne hathaway films over and over again, maybe seen him pause on one of her frames and creepily caress the screen or whatever. i mean, couldn't he have uhhhh put more of his film budget towards more fake blood? prosthetics? anything?
i just felt like this was such a nothingburger of a movie in the end, like... yes, we see him kill these actresses one by one (except for the last girl, who was clearly the most intelligent one of the three that we see) and the deaths weren't even that bloody. he meets up with a second actress who he deems as being "too fat" to play anne and ends their little rendevous by hacking out her... stomach, i think? presumably to literally carve her into the image of his goddess madame hathaway. i say presumably because... he gets these two girls to set up his little torture room for him so he can tie the 2nd girl to the bedframe in this abandoned office space and tie up a bedsheet to conceal what he's actually doing (pictured above)
again, all under the guise that they're filming a horror movie. i guess... that excuse lets you get away with anything in Romania. huh. good to know.
it's an excuse that works so well that whenever we do see other strangers trying to interfere with whatever madness adrian gets up to, he just informs them they're filming a slasher and away they go on their merry way... even when they have a woman SCREAMING in their faces to help her. they simply do not even move the sheet out of the way to take a peek. okay. i understand suspension of disbelief for the sake of a film but geez louise were all of these people hella dumb or what? half of the shit that happened in this movie happened because everyone-- actresses included-- seemed super naive and willing to take a creepy dude's word as gospel. dunno what that says about the people of Romania...
i kinda wish we got to take a peek behind the sheet a little bit. how much does skin-colored putty cost again? i'm sure the director could've spilled red jam all over her torso and we would've just shrugged and accepted it. in fact, i feel like there were a lot of weird and impractical choices being made wrt the whole production overall :/ for all i know, this could've also been filmed in one day. i just feel like the quality of this film would easily be explained away by that. still doesn't really impress me either way
i wanted more, and this film sadly left a lot to be desired in the end. it was really a whole lotta nothing, a whole lotta listening to a weird psycho dude ramble on and on and on about how he loves anne so much, and how he's gonna take such good care of her when she gets to his house and how his movie is gonna change the world and... yeah, you get it. no need to go on like a broken record.
rating? 2/10. 2 stars for effort and for the incredible and frightening accuracy that adrian portrayed a misogynistic awkward shut-in who has no idea how to act around people. it kinda makes me slightly suspicious that adrian gifts his character his name and likeness and everything, doesn't even try to pick another fake name to go by while he films this but... well, i'm sure no one has to check his hard drive or anything ahahaha
i'm sure he's actually a nice guy irl!
but this movie was far from the most disturbing and horrifying found footage movie i've ever seen imo... idk. i guess this one wasn't it for me. it left me more frustrated and bored than scared and entertained. perhaps i went in knowing it was a fake film, and that's what ruined the immersion for me? only hindsight can tell.
thx for reading!
↞ back to Found Footage page