Li Tung (Lawrence Lau) lives in a high-rise apartment building. In the middle of the night he is woken up by pounding coming from the apartment upstairs. He goes to confront the tenant. Inside is an older man, a young woman and a cat. The man apologizes for the noise. Li Tung goes back to bed only to hear the pounding resume.
The next day Tung sees a moving truck outside the building. He sees that the tenants in the apartment above him are moving. Being nosey he goes to the apartment to see what they were doing all night. He finds bloody newspapers on the floor and something that looks like guts. Tung calls the police. The investigation reveals that the guts belong to a cat. Tung looks like an idiot.
Later Tung tells his friends, Inspector Wang Chieh-Mei (Phillip Chung-Fung Kwok), Wei Si Li “Wisley” (Waise Lee), and Wisely’s girlfriend, Pai So (Christine Ng). Wisely does some investigating and comes to believe that the strangers come from another star.
That night at a museum, the man, who is a knight named Errol (Siu-Ming Lau), the woman, Princess (Gloria Yip), and the cat, who is a knight named Colonel, break in and steal an ancient sculpture. They are attacked by a slimy gelatinous shape-shifting alien monster that can possess people. They manage to escape with the relic.
Investigating further, Wisely finds out where the trio of aliens moved to. He eventually learns that the three are indeed from another star and are trying to kill the space monster known as a “star killer”. To do that they need to find a second ancient artifact which when joined together will give the aliens the power to destroy the monster and return home.
“The Cat” AKA “Lo Mau” AKA “The 1000 Years Cat” was released in 1992 and was directed by Ngai Choi Lam. It is a Hong Kong science fiction horror film. The film was based on the novel “Old Cat” by Ni Kuang.
The whole thing is farfetched, but that’s OK. It’s a mass of silly over-the-top effects and a fun story with some gore and a cool cat. Well, a bunch of cats. I’m not sure how many were used to make the film. The monster looks like, well, everything. Sometimes it looks like a lightning filled mushroom, a blob, and several things in between.
The author of the original novel, Ni Kuang, has a small part as Mr. Chen, the dog trainer. The highlight of the film is a kung-fu style fight in a junkyard between the cat and a dog borrowed from a dog trainer. It is equal parts stupid and awesome. There was some controversy concerning the fight between the dog and the cat. Due to abuse concerns, the special effects creator was replaced by Shinji Higuchi.
Ni Kuang wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of 156 science fiction and adventure novels based on the ‘Wisely’ character. From my understanding, this was something like the fifth film based on his stories.