It’s hard to put into words just how bizarre and unsettling 2003’s adaptation of beloved children’s story The Cat in the Hat really is unless you’ve had the misfortune of witnessing it with your own eyes, but we’ll try and break it down into cold, hard, merciless, and unforgiving facts.
The egregiously awful blockbuster (which incredibly boasts future three-time Academy Award winner Emmanuel Lubezki as cinematographer) flopped hard at the box office after earning a miserly $133 million on a $109 million budget, but not before securing an entirely deserved reputation as one of the worst big budget features ever made.
A 10 percent Rotten Tomatoes score is bad enough, but The Cat in the Hat then went on to land a mind-blowing 10 nominations at that year’s Razzies, nabbing wins for Worst Picture and Worst Excuse for an Actual Movie (All Concept/No Content). Myers was reportedly very difficult to work with during the production, too, with his assistant allegedly feeding him chocolate on demand. Oh, and Alec Baldwin f*cking hates it, even though he was the top-billed cast member who wasn’t buried under prosthetics.
Intrepid Redditors have been dissecting the diabolical failure, though, and it’s clear 19 years hasn’t been long enough to soften anybody’s opinion. The Cat in the Hat features an alarming amount of sexual innuendo and double entendre for what’s supposed to be an all-ages family frolic, and there’s just something so undeniably and (hopefully) accidentally sinister about the whole thing from start to finish.
Fortunately, it only lasts for 82 minutes including credits, but it’s one of the most unexpectedly f*cked-up films you’ll ever see, which we can only hope wasn’t the intention from the start.
