The Funniest, Meanest Lines From The Very Bad Reviews For The 'Cats' Movie

From the moment that the first trailer dropped for Tom Hooper's film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Broadway classic "Cats," the internet's mouths have been firmly agape. The fur-covered cast of all-star actors (and Jason Derulo) was a nasty shock to the system and it was difficult to see how the movie would end up being, well, any good.

In a sense, then, "Cats" has not disappointed, because it is apparently quite bad. To help you get a sense of just how bad, we've gathered some of the funniest, rudest lines from the reviews that dropped on Wednesday:

• "There is a thin line between idiocy and genius, and Cats pukes a hairball on it and rubs its ass all over it." [SlashFilm]
• "Millions of dollars and thousands of hours have been sunk into making the cats in Cats look like hypertrichotic mutants from the Uncanny Valley Of Dr. Moreau." [AV Club]
• "[D]irector Tom Hooper's outlandishly tacky interpretation seems destined to become one of those once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments that mars the résumés of great actors and trips up the careers of promising newcomers." [Variety]
• "It has been a while since a big-budget, star-packed studio film has felt like such a disaster from start to finish." [Wired]
• "For the most part, 'Cats' is both a horror and an endurance test, a dispatch from some neon-drenched netherworld where the ghastly is inextricable from the tedious." [LA Times]
• "'I remember / the time I knew what happiness was,' Grizabella sings. You will remember it, too, and you will know it again once you have ascended to your own Heaviside Layer, located just beyond the light of the exit sign." [LA Times]
• "It's hard to 'ruin' Webber's already strange musical, but Tom Hooper's wrongheaded attempt certainly tries." [The Wrap]
• "[Y]ou will witness things no eyes should see and things nobody should be able to do, and you will be in awe." [io9]
• "Nothing is accomplished by turning Cats into a garish CGI experiment, and just about everything is lost." [Vanity Fair]
• "[T]oo long to make… an enjoyable acid trip." [CNET]
• "A doctoral thesis could be written on how this misfire sputtered into existence, though there's nothing new about the movies' energetic embrace of bad taste." [New York Times]
• "To assess Cats as good or bad feels like the entirely wrong axis on which to see it. It is, with all affection, a monstrosity." [Vulture]
• "Cats is a fever dream, a hallucination, an approximation of what would happen if your third eye actually opened and you could suddenly see into the astral plane." [Polygon]
• "I can't help respecting how defiantly illogical it all is." [BBC]
• "I found it all exhausting." [Hollywood Reporter]
• "The queasy fears prompted by one of the most disturbing movie trailers ever seen are realised in full in Tom Hooper's jaw-dropping feline folly." [The Guardian]

CATS IS THE WORST MOVIE I HAVE SEEN THIS YEAR, A TRULY AWFUL AND UGLY FILM THAT I WISH I COULD ERASE FROM MY BRAIN

— Tyler Coates (@tylercoates) December 19, 2019

the trauma of CATS, and what it does to Judi Dench, will linger with me

— Michelle Dean (@michelledean) December 19, 2019

CATS is pure nightmare fuel. The rejects from The Island of Dr. Moreau putting on a show is bad enough, but add to that more crotch shots than a Michael Bay movie and every imaginable pun...and that still won't prepare you for the hellscape that is children faces CGIed onto mice.

— Jenelle Riley (@jenelleriley) December 19, 2019

Glad to report that Cats is everything you'd hoped for and more: a mesmerisingly ugly fiasco that makes you feel like your brain is being eaten by a parasite. A viewing experience so stressful that it honestly brought on a migraine.

— Robbie Collin (@robbiereviews) December 19, 2019

Watch the trailer again, if you dare: