Star Paws (2016)

I've got a bad feeling about this... In my ongoing effort to subject myself to some of the absolute worst garbage I can physically get access to, I stumbled across an FTW film on the internet called: Star Paws. A family friendly parody of the Star Wars franchise substituting the human characters with warring factions of cats and dogs... To be honest with you, just on paper this already sounds like a fucking stupid idea. The kind of thing some brainless, out-of-touch studio executives come up with because they know it'll pop a rating on broadcast television amongst all the working mums and dads who just need something, anything to distract the kids for an hour. But to actually put it into practice and spend actual money on it, and then release it, is a very, very bold move. I used to be big into the Star Wars franchise, but to be honest they killed my love at little bit with some very sub par prequals and then obliterated it to smithereens with a sub par sequel: The Force Awakens. A movie that features some fantastic actors, no doubt, but that I was so disappointed with I just sort of lost interest and haven't even bothered to catch the other x2 or the subsequent TV series'. That being said when they're not plagiarising and parodying their own movies with their own movies, there is ripe material for other studios to rip them off and do a piss poor job whilst they're at it, and I don't doubt that's precisely what has happened here. So I'm morbidly curious about just how bad this is genuinely going to be.

Opening with a fair old chunk of exposition, we learn that Captain Adventure Cat (voice: KJ Schrock) intends to seize an incredibly rare dinosaur bone, basically just to stop the dogs getting their hands on it, but also believing it will give him and vicariously, his army, the power to rule over the multiverse... And that agents of the B.I.A - a super canine task force, who protect the galaxy from evil, as well as seek out all the tasty dog treats, intend to travel back in time 65 million years to Jurassic period Earth in order to get "the bone", before the cats do. After Dr Bones (voice: also KJ Schrock) carries out analysis of a bone fragment found in a museum he determines that it is indeed a fragment of "the bone," he devises a time machine in order to travel back and retrieve "the bone," deciding first to test it on his assistant: Shortstack (voice: April Rose) but his initial test fails. After learning that... and just go with it... chickens... first developed a time machine in order to travel back in time and meet their ancestors: dinosaurs... the B.I.A drafts in the help of chickens in order to finish their own machine but not before Adventure Cat learns of their plan and also announces loudly to Dr. Bones and friends of his intention to also build a time machine and travel back to the Jurassic era... Completing work on his own time machine, Dr. Bones and Shortstack carry out a test, sending Shortstack back to 1867 and the time of the American Civil War, followed by a further test, sending Shortstack back to the Jurassic era successfully. On the verge of making their journey, Adventure Cat breaks in to B.I.A headquarters and damages the time machine meaning the repairs cannot be carried out in time and the dogs now only have 24 hours to get to the Jurassic period, get the bone and make it home or risk Adventure Cat seizing the bone before they do with his machine. Pressing ahead anyway, Dr. Bones and Shortstack make the journey across time, arriving in the Jurassic era and after speaking to a Stegosaurus in a scene that honestly felt like it went on forever... the dogs are directed to climb a cliff to meet with the Brachiosaurs. But along along the way they run into Velociraptors and have to use an invisibility formula to disappear and escape and decide to spend the night in safety inside the bushes. The following morning, after Shortstack gets rid of a Dilophosaurus by farting... no really...  the dogs reach the Brachiosaurs who, after revealing that Adventure Cat has first beaten them to it, makes the dogs answer 3 riddles before he will point them in the right direction. After providing the correct answers, the Brachiosaurs direct the dogs to speak to the Triceratops who knows more about "the bone," and direct the dogs to a bone nest guarded by Spinosaurus. However before the dogs reach the nest, they cross paths with Trevor the T-Rex (Bobby Catalano) who it transpires had been forewarned by the chickens that the dogs would be travelling back in time. I err... genuinely can't believe I just typed that sentence. He spares the dogs as he wants them to pass on his liver casserole recipe back to the chickens when they return to their time (yes, really. I'm not making this up) and he also gives them directions to "the bone," and promises to take care of the Spinosaurus for them. Arriving at the site of "the bone," the dogs discover Adventure Cat beat them to it, but after returning back to present day, the dogs travel back in time to 5 minutes before they arrived originally where they retrieve "the bone," and replace it with a fake for Adventure Cat to find! But in doing so, they accidentally change the timeline and unleash Dinosaurs into the modern world!

Wow. This was an acid trip man. I have watched some absolute bonkers stuff like this before: Killer Robots which was... unhinged and this wasn't quite as chaotic as that but it was close. It's incredibly obvious that it was made on the tiniest of tiny budgets, if they scraped into 3 figures I'd be amazed to be honest with you, and boy it was glaringly obvious. I mean, it was downright terrible. A terrible, terrible movie, but in a way sort of endearing. Like, it was pissing dreadful, but made with good intentions. And there was some redeeming factors, but in terms of a production: it was incredibly bad.

I saw a comment on the video that described the cats as "nightmare fuel," and to be honest with you, that wasn't far wrong, whilst the dogs were live action uh... actors... the cats were full CGI and they looked mostly like cats, but they had this crazy anthropomorphic appearance going on to make them look a bit more evil I guess, and it was a little bit unsettling, not gonna lie. 

The rest of the special effects were really, really, amateur. The dinosaurs looked really obviously computer generated, and seemed to have 1 or 2 cycles of animation that they just continuously looped through. The scenes and settings also, when not shot in real locations, looked like a late 90's computer game and were so obviously computer generated. They do get bonus points though, for the obvious amount of home crafting that went into building the time machine prop which must have taken hours.

Although production wise this was a... dogs dinner if you will. See what I did there? The cats and dinosaurs, despite being CGI, just seemed to loop through a short animation cycle, as previously mentioned, and their mouths just moved randomly not in time or even vaguely resembling the correct movements in correspondence to what they were saying. The dogs, being live action, didn't even have mouth movements at all and all the voices were just spliced on top of a scene featuring the animal in question talking. It worked better some times than it did others... Aside from that, the movies low budget-ness meant the incredibly brief and sparse action scenes were so short and chaotic that it was really confusing to understand what was happening. There was also a massive volume of scene recycling going on. The same scene being used 3,4, sometimes 5 times to convey a moment to move the plot along.

However despite the amateur filmmaking, the movie did have some merits. It did serve to sandwich in some nice educational snippets about the dinosaurs, and despite being incredibly thin and barebones on the storyline front, it at least had a consistent plot that it stuck too. Even if it was slightly difficult to understand what was going on during a few moments. It kept things simple so as to not baffle it's intended younger audience but there was a narrative skeleton that the movie was built around.

Although that above point and this movies positives accounted for, it's target audience was obviously very young children, and I think - putting myself in their position - after you get over the morbid curiosity of the first 10 minutes featuring talking cats and talking dogs you are going to get rapidly bored of this movie and the obvious crapiness is going to sink in pretty quickly. I couldn't honestly picture small children sitting their way through this thing the whole way through and enjoying the experience and if it falls at that hurdle, it's only hurdle it realistically has to overcome, then regrettably it's a failure. But if you happen to have taken some extremely powerful mind bending drugs and you want to go on a pretty freaky trip, stick it on and see how the night progresses. 1 out of 5.