‘That Darn Cat’ Has a Dark Side

Crammed with crowd-pleasing formulas--animal antics, an alienated teenager, a bumbling detective, a fast-moving plot and a car chase--”That Darn Cat” aimed to offer something for everyone but managed to engage only the most patient school-age children.

Babies wandered the theater. Grown-ups dozed.

“I was falling asleep,” said Louise Chavez of Costa Mesa. “But she liked it,” she said referring to granddaughter Jaclyn Butler, 9.

A fan of animal movies, Jaclyn said she’s seen better and worse. But she also said she chuckled almost all the way through Disney’s remake of its 1965 family comedy. “It was kind of good,” she said.

The 1997 version has a dark edge to it, with a poker-faced Ricci playing a stereotypically hostile teen. Patty is a loner who wears dark lipstick and black clothes (“because it matches my soul”). She fulfills a class assignment to write about something she likes by writing why she hates her town. “The town has the power to suck people’s brains out, and no one notices,” she writes.

Emily Howard and her friend Kandia Triantos, both 9, of Huntington Beach, liked the film but couldn’t relate to Ricci. “She was weird,” Kandia said, “She looked like a lawyer. She always wore black.”

The only thing Patty likes is her cat. And, for the star of the show, he’s pretty bland.

But he does have an active night life. Leaving the house every night at 8 p.m., he trots through town, scamming an old dog out of his food, playing with an elderly woman’s caged bird and uncovering secrets such as the female butcher’s secret crush on a policeman.

When he returns one morning with a watch around his neck, Patty recognizes it from a news photo of a kidnap victim (it may have an edge, but it’s still Disney). When she sees the word “hell” scratched on the back, she alters it to read “help,” and the chase begins.

Of course, no one believes she has a clue to the case. Equally stereotypical, her mother is overcritical and dimwitted. (Patty calls her “the Mother.”) Her father is kinder but dopey. When he learns Patty is investigating the case, he colludes to hide the truth from the Mother.

Her only ally is bumbling FBI agent Zeke Kelso (Doug E. Doug). Kids in the audience were tickled when he followed D.C.’s nighttime path, trying to distract the old dog with Motown songs and discern the cat’s destination by method-acting like a cat. (“I am instinct, I am motion.”)

Stephanie Gardner, 7, of Costa Mesa, enjoyed the slapstick when the agent fell through some rotting stairs.

Kandia said she liked untangling the mystery best. And at the very least, she said, “the cat was cute.”

AT ISSUE: Have you taken a school-age child to a family movie only to find it preceded by trailers for R-rated movies with scenes of violence and sex? Last month at a luncheon in Beverly Hills, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, whose parent panel rates the movies, was confronted by a mother upset over it.

His solution? Leave the kids at home.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Valenti said at the event, sponsored by the Los Angeles Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect. “I would never take a 4-year-old or a 5-year-old or a 6-year-old, or maybe a 7-year-old, to a movie theater under any circumstances.

“I would let them watch videocassettes, where I would pick out the ones I want them to see.”

A PG-13 rating means the panel believes there may be problems for children under age 13 and that parents should find out more about the picture before their children go to see it.

“Take my advice,” he said. “There are wonderful videocassettes for children to see. ‘Old Yeller.’ I guarantee your 5-year-old will love it.”

What about trailers on television? Valenti said: “Every trailer you see on TV that comes from R-rated movies has been sanitized . . .

“We try our best,” he said. “God knows we try.”