“It’s like we’re on a field trip with a bunch of grade schoolers.”

Justin’s rating: Just another solid reason to never trust cats

Justin’s review: If you got hooked on the amazing array of scifi/horror franchises that emerged in the ’80s and craved even more, you might be tempted to lower your expectations and trawl the knock-off section of the video store shelves. But before you do that, may I suggest experiencing a similar movie that’s actually quite good?

Lily C.A.T. is a 1987 anime flick that’s the unapologetic inspirational offspring of two classic flicks: Alien (haunted house in space) and The Thing (paranoia with a shapeshifting monster). It’s a legitimate cult classic with a horribly dumb title that makes me think of heavy construction machinery.

At the start of Lily B.A.T., an interstellar company cruiser spends 20 years crossing the cosmos to a strange new world to explore it in order to see if there’s anything to exploit. While the crew is in suspended animation, the ship — on the company’s orders — picks up an extraterrestrial organism to see what it might do to people.

As the baker’s dozen awake toward the end of their journey, they gradually find out that the ship is now a giant lethal test tube — and that two of their numbers aren’t who they say they are. With the organism subsuming its victims, it’s a race to grab some flamethrowers and torch anything even slightly suspicious before the entire crew gets assimilated.

In this tight 67-minute package is a virtual buffet of paranoia. The ship’s crew doesn’t exactly trust the science team, knowing that two of them are fakers. Plus, there’s an extra secret cat that is a robot mastermind or something. Everyone’s trapped there, unless they can escape to the planet below… and what then?

Because of the short runtime, Lily S.P.A.T. often seems to operate in narrative fast-forward, robbing us of some of the more expected scenes of heightening tension. Once people start dying and stuff goes wrong, it all goes fast. Perhaps that wouldn’t be the case if everyone wasn’t so hellbent on peeling off from the main group and exploring the dark, foreboding corridors by their lonesome.

Another casualty of the condensed movie format means that so many conversations are info dumps, playing into the mystery angle that’s far less interesting than the creepy alien prowling through the ship. So it’s a lot of: Talk talk talk, something interesting or gross happens, talk talk talk. It’s weird to say “pacing” is a problem in a film this short, but it is.

It’s not a dealbreaker, however. The atmosphere is top notch, with the ship corroding and falling apart as a kind of countdown timer to doom. The cast is take it or leave it, although I really could’ve left the crazy cat lady (yes, there’s a crazy cat lady) back in Act 1 without any regret. I also want to note that Lily C.A.T.I.N.T.H.E.H.A.T. isn’t nearly as gross or disturbing as some other anime “classics” that I saw back in the day, but it does recapture some of those special moments of tension and lurking horror that its inspirations held.

It was an interesting watch that will go into the same box where I keep all of the other odd Alien knock-offs. It is one of the better ones, though. And if nothing else, you can make a fun “spot the obvious ripoff reference” game out of this.

Intermission!

• Cat eye fade to a ship crossing a planet
• “I sure don’t want to wake up a wrinkled old hag.”
• Crewmember who says this is his last voyage just put a death warrant on his head
• Why is she upside-down in suspended animation when everyone else isn’t?
• That computer screen for the orbit is the EXACT SAME graphic as the one in Alien
• “They’re time escapees.”
• That is one very, very dead kitty
• People burst open and explode in space, apparently
• He’s 230 years old
• The speech about why hibernation is a cruel life
• One shotgun recoil took out two people
• They never stop splitting up, do they?
• If a wall is dissolving before you with eyeballs coming through, perhaps don’t stay there?
• They go out for welding equipment, they come back with gigantic flamethrowers
• TORCH THAT KITTY
• Computers respond well if you type “please”
• That’s one way to get out of handcuffs
• The ship continually falling apart is really cool
• He brought his own shuttle just for kicks