“This is another kids… alert. The candy thief has struck again. All the kids are crying.”

Justin’s rating: Zero cools out of several hundred thousand “cools”

Justin’s review: We’re all familiar with bad movies, but we have to acknowledge that there’s a special level of “bad” when it comes to terrible entertainment made for children. Those kinds of movies tend to be condescending, cringy, and supremely non-entertaining, becoming a hell to watch. And that’s exactly what I suffered through when I sat through the director’s cut of Cool Cat Saves the Kids.

Why did I do this? My children are at fault, as they saw a clip from this on YouTube, lost their heads over it, and started demanding we view it as a family. I get it, there’s some fun in mocking a so-bad-it’s-good movie, and there were certainly a lot of incredulous giggles to be had while watching this piece of lousy infotainment.

Let’s start at the beginning because, whewwwww, this is a doozy of a stinker. Cool Cat is based on a “help your kid not to die and/or avoid bad life situations” book series written by a guy named Derek Savage. Without doing a lick of research on Savage, I can tell you that (a) he’s got a huge bald spot that shows up in 75% of his scenes, (b) his ego is riding as high as Tommy Wiseau’s all over this project, and (c) he’s a complete dork who thinks that he is the Kid Whisperer. Then I looked him up, found out that he was a former Playgirl model, and I closed my laptop and had to go into a deep meditative stance in order to not lose it.

Savage’s writing and acting would’ve been rejected outright by the youth of this nation back in the early ’80s, nevermind in 2015. So it’s to nobody’s surprise that this home release wasn’t the savior of child bullying so much as it became the easy pickings for an internet that hated poor efforts and preachy furries.

Cool Cat (who’s now dubbed over by Savage in the director’s cut) is a giant cat who wears one of four shirts all advertising himself and says everything in utter astonishment. I kid you not, every line he utters has at least three exclamation points at the end. Every. Line. Cool Cat is thrilled at all things, surprised at all things, horrified by all things, and is a master rapper.

Of course this movie contains rapping. Of course he’s going to rhyme “cool” and “school.”

The film — which is 90 minutes but I swear felt like six unending days of torment — gradually follows Cool Cat as he runs for school president, goes through several daily routines* and deals with every life situation, big and small, with a loooooong pandering talk with those around him. Mister Rogers, no speed talker himself, would be able to narrate the entire Harry Potter series in the time that it takes Cool Cat to work out what to do with a text from an unknown number. Should he open it? Maybe? It could be a new friend! Wait, it’s a meanie! But there’s another text! Maybe he should open this one in case the meanie is apologizing? Oh no! He didn’t apologize!

For some reason, Cool Cat and his mother Mama Cat are the only non-humans in this world. Mama Cat (voiced by, I am not making this up, martial arts action star Cynthia Rothrock) is married to “Daddy Derek” (Savage himself). This immediately brings to mind a lot of questions that I want to ask but also never want to have answered, especially about how Cool Cat was conceived and what the neighbors think is happening in this house. And those neighbors have a right to be concerned, because an inappropriate number of children hang out there and “Daddy Derek” struts around the place with his shirt open and chest hair wafting and ignoring the loaded guns in the back yard. While nobody was kidnapped or molested on camera, the vibe is such that you kind of anticipate that it could happen at any moment.

Sure, there are eventually some developments regarding bullying, with the antagonist being a lisping kid named Butch that continually refers to himself as a “bully,” but it’s not that interesting until the very end when Butch actually gets ahold of a real revolver and is yanked off the street — twice! — by cops and presumably jailed for life. But bullying and the dealing with thereof is not actually the main focus of this movie.

No, Cool Cat Saves the Kids is actually about Derek Savage trying to convince you that he’s the real “cool cat.” He inserts himself into far too many scenes that have nothing to do with anything other than showing the audience his stuff. We see Savage showing off his audio and green screen equipment, his three-wheeled motorcycle, his guitar signed by Van Halen, practically every room in his home, his front yard, his quite small back yard, his ninja equipment (which he sort of practices on a bundle of sticks), and his smoking hot giant cat of a wife who has Botox lips.

Savage also lost his mind over all of the highly critical YouTube reviews of this film when the internet tore into it, so he tried to (ironically) bully those content creators to remove the videos (a crusade he lost when the Streisand Effect kicked in).

This is why the movie abruptly takes us to, say, a construction site where Savage “teaches” Cool Cat how to do the bare minimum of work on home renovation or a Christmas parade where Savage clearly pulled strings to let him and Cool Cat ride a convertible and fail to impress anyone in the crowd. Trust me, I was watching everyone in the background, and the confused and apathetic faces when this rando costumed cat shows up is apparent. But then I was distracted by the subtitle** excitedly telling me that this shot was at the “famous Hollywood and Vine!!!”

I got so desperate for actual entertainment that I was willing to be thrilled by the four seconds that this movie showed me the Back to the Future DeLorean, the Ghostbusters’ ECTO-1, and the Batmobile at the parade. And then I experienced a real flash of anger when the film immediately cut away for more Cool Cat idiocy. I would rather watch 90 minutes of those cars sitting there than anything this furball had to say.

There really aren’t enough words to properly document all of the ways that Cool Cat Saves the Kids is a befuddling mess. It’s a nonstop stream of weirdness punctuated by Cool Cat’s constant exclamations of “WOW!” and “COOOOOOOOL!”

We get music videos with every filter in existence, a random appearance of Vivica A. Fox and Erik Estrada drinking lemonade, a girl named Maria who may be the real bully of this film, about six separate scenes of the actor in Cool Cat’s suit intently looking down at the stairs as he tries not to kill himself, pictures of Cool Cat taped over the actual paintings in Derek Savage’s bedroom, a camera that was probably mounted on a Slinky for all of the stability that it shows, sound that is tonally inconsistent, a failure to properly use the term “punk’d,” and one kid spanking himself to demonstrate how his parents just spanked him.

Even if you love riffing on bad movies, I’d urge you to think long and hard before diving into this one, because the bare minimum of plot and excess of over-talking is brutal to endure. I almost fell asleep about four times while trying to get through this, and I’m a professional movie reviewer. You don’t stand a chance.

*Including exercising, brushing his teeth, pretending to eat, and having his dad help him in and out of the car because the actor couldn’t manipulate the door handles.

**In Comic Sans because everything in this movie is the absolute worst.