Strays (1991)

Wow! Such a good movie.

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

I'm an ardent cat lover and I did NOT like this film. First off the premise is extremely silly, second cats get a bad enough rap by the jerks in Hollyweird always trying to make dogs so damn great. Cats are sweet, loving, wonderful and many times good mommies to their babies. This movie sucks and it was stupid. I do not recommend at all

Really stupid bad movie. An older woman with a lot of cats is attacked by something that more or less flies at her, apparently a feral cat (we don't see it, only hear it growling). A couple with a young daughter move into the house; the wife's sister is the real estate agent, and she is also a client of the husband, a divorce lawyer. The wife grows jealous of her sister and in fact, her sister does seem to be pretty slutty and controlling.The daughter is annoying and stupid. The wife is hysterical, somewhat shrewish, and stupid. The husband is fairly stupid too. The cats (evidently the woman's pets now work for the strange black cat that killed her) as a threat are not particularly convincing. More or less, you have to fall down and be knocked unconscious to be seriously hurt by them.At one point the husband tries to microwave his coffee. The microwave doesn't work because it has a badly frayed power cord. A divorce lawyer who works in the city can't afford to repair the cord or get a new microwave? With a young daughter in the house, you want a frayed wire (not to mention the fire hazard)? They don't even unplug the microwave when it proves unable to microwave when the cable is jiggled. There must be another reason why they don't replace it or unplug it... and there is. There are other elements in the movie that are similarly telegraphed way ahead of time.The director likes a lot of cat point-of-view shots which gets to be pretty corny, and also likes zooms in on and close-ups of inanimate objects. There are also a couple of false endings at the end, where it seems like the movie should be over, but it keeps going.

The basic, unavoidable, fundamental problem with this TV scare flick is that cats...are...not...scary. I can understand alligators, rabid dogs, even that movie about killer slugs ("Slugs") sort of worked because the animals are either potentially dangerous or at least disgustingly vile. But unless you are of the .001 percent of the population with a cat phobia "Strays" will just strike you as ridiculous (the sight of Timothy Busfield running from a bad stuffed kitty with claws doesn't lessen the laugh ratio of this "horror" movie). The real cats in the movie don't look any different from your average house cat and the preponderance of strays in the movie's country house is more a commercial for the necessity of spay/neuter programs than striking terror in the audience's collective hearts.

A couple years ago while in college, my roommate and I were flipping channels before heading off to a history class we were both enrolled in. That day we never made it to class because USA was showing this as its afternoon movie and we became so entertained by the crappiness of this film that we didn't dare leave before seeing the conclusion. You will want to slap Kathleen Quinlan silly for the way she freaks out -- so what, you have some stray cats in your house, she let them in the house in the first place!!! I forget where her husband is during all of this, but other people who come to help and investigate are put out of commission by these violent kitties. One of my favorite scenes is where she goes to look for her "baby" (who is like a 5 year old girl) in the crib and there is nothing but cats to be found and Quinlan freaks out as if they had eaten her ugly daughter. If you are looking for something scary, don't even consider this because the supposed suspense and chills are nonexistent -- but it was good for a laugh and skipping a boring class.