Why Halle Berry's 'Catwoman' might be the perfect covd movie

Halle Berry's Catwoman is one of those movies that seems like it should be from 30 years ago, when it's actually from the mid-2000s. It's so hopelessly inept that it would make many other 'bad' movies blush. It's so bad you feel embarrassed for everyone who was involved.

It's a fun movie to watch with friends during a time like this though, because it offers plenty to talk about (or rather talk over) and it's a piece of crap that benefits from a running commentary.

I think I'd half watched it before, but I had forgotten so many elements of it: the hilariously bad CGI (including many, many fake cats), the strange lore the film uses to justify its existence, Sharon Stone's surreal performance as the villain and the wackadoo camera work that is border-line seizure inducing.

When it dawns on you that Berry used what little capital she had from her Oscar-winning turn in Monster's Ball (a movie that gets more problematic with each passing year) to headline this long in development hell project, it's hard to remove your palm from your forehead.

The movie exposes all of her deficiencies as an actress. She just can't do subtlety. It's as if the director's one note to her was 'act like a cat, literally, all the time'. It's more of a sashay than a performance. Sure, she looks incredible, but you can say that about her in every movie she's ever been in (including Monster's Ball, in which she is supposed to look de-glammed). But there is now wit or substance behind a single one of her line readings.

There's a reason so few of her film roles resonate. She is a star, but she isn't a particularly resonant actress. When you stack her work up her against Michelle Pfeiffer and Anne Hathaway, the other two big screen Catwoman, there's no comparison. Those actresses hinted at the potential this anti-hero has -- and what's unfortunate is that a really interested, grounded movie could be made with this character (think Joker, with a jaded woman at its center instead of a lonely, delusional man), but instead the makers of this movie made something that should appeal to... no one?

CGI cats galore

It's plot revolves around a beauty product conspiracy. It's romance centers around an improbably stupid cop (played by a constantly grinning Benjamin Bratt) who keeps miraculously running into Berry in what appears to be a sprawling metropolis. The villain's 'superpower' is that he face is hard as marble...

Meanwhile, it's backstory involves some sort of strange mystic feline energy explained by Frances Conroy in a performance that is too silly for words.

And the less said about Alex Borstein's surreal performance as Berry's horny-as-hell best friend the better.

It's like a blueprint for how not to make this kind of movie. And thankfully in the years that followed Hollywood by and large smartened up about this genre. Sure there is still the occasional Suicide Squad, but these movies by-and-large tend to be more watchable than not. Miraculously, actors rarely make fools of themselves despite wearing these ludicrous costumes and more often than not fighting computer generated creatures.

Berry doesn't fare as well in part because her costume is more pornographic than comic book-y and the film's director (the single named Pitof) can't stage an action scene and insists on using a rubbery avatar in all the Catwoman acting like a cat scenes.

And yet, I got several belly laughs watching it simultaneously on Amazon with friends over Google Hangout (it's an appropriately cheap $1.99 on Amazon) and that's the best you can do right now in the hell we're all living in. If there was ever a time to fall in love with a horrible movie it's now. And you really can't go wrong with this one, which does everything wrong.