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DIRECTED BY: Derek Savage

FEATURING: Derek Savage, Erik Estrada, Vivica A. Fox, several innocent children who don’t deserve to have their good names sullied by mentioning them here

PLOT: Cool Cat, a human-sized bipedal feline who loves you and himself in equal measure, spends his days learning important life lessons, watching Daddy Derek engage in various self-improvement pastimes, and creating rock songs about love, friendship, and the general awesomeness of being Cool Cat. 

COMMENTS: This is potentially the most perilous review I’ve ever written. After all, when the video blog “I Hate Everything” decided to share its assessment of Cool Cat Saves the Kids, the helpful feline’s caretaker, Derek Savage, launched an all-out assault on them, allegedly impersonating a lawyer to issue threats and soliciting a DMCA takedown order from YouTube. (Another YouTuber with whom Savage sparred, YMS, produced a follow-up video to explain copyright law and the Fair Use doctrine.) So while I’m hopeful that the passage of a decade will have softened Savage’s feelings toward critical opinions, one can never be sure.

So let’s tread carefully, because we rarely venture into the genre of children’s safety videos. As anyone who has had a child anytime in the past two decades knows, there is a massive market for peppy, carefully-worded productions that use some sort of animated or costumed character to import crucial lessons about staying alive in a dangerous world, covering topics from traffic safety to home safety to stranger danger. They are often amateurish, frequently unbearable to the adult mind, and sometimes very effective with their young audience. So if we’re being charitable, we could say that Savage spotted an opportunity to use his skills as a Hollywood extra and Playgirl model to advocate on behalf of the kids. If we’re less than charitable, we might say that he saw a marketing opportunity.

What gets Savage mentioned in the same sentence with legends like Ed Wood and Tommy Wiseau are his deeply lo-fi moviemaking skills. Beginning with the goofy Comic Sans opening credits (which include a credit for Cool Cat himself as, of all things, associate producer), the whole production has big Vegas-suburb energy, with plenty of scenes located in someone’s guest bedroom that has been decorated with pictures of Cool Cat and signs reading “Cool Cat Loves You,” desperate improvisation that take the form of characters describing every action they take, some wonderfully melodramatic child acting, and a hero whose primary action is to holler “Yay!” at every opportunity. Cool Cat is happy about absolutely everything, and every dicey situation is resolved with Cool Cat’s commitment to just, you know, not do the bad thing and then launch into a green-screened musical interlude about being cool. So repetitive and unengaging is the film (which is actually a mashup of three separate Cool Cat shorts) that it took several days for me to make it through the full 90-minute running time. 

But I feel that there’s something weirder than what the movie is, and that’s what the movie wants to do. Remember, this is a video designed to educate children on how to be safe, healthy, and happy. It’s educational. So let’s take a look at a few of the things that our hero and role model does with great enthusiasm in this movie: 

• Ride on the back of a motorcycle without a helmet
• Eat frosted cereal
• Encourage a friend to open an anonymous email, and then later do so himself
• Revel in the misfortune of someone he doesn’t like
• Perform unlicensed rehab work on a derelict house
• Find a gun in his backyard, and then leave it unattended so that the local bully can steal it

If you go back and look at those silly opening credits again, one thing you won’t see is a consultant or educational advisor. Because of course there isn’t one. This all springs from a single mind, and the only item on his lesson plan is to share the wonder and wisdom of Derek Savage. So let’s take a look at a few of the things that the man repeatedly called “Daddy Derek” does with great enthusiasm in this movie:

• Drive a giant motorcycle without a helmet
• Work out, including a very curious exercise involving striking a rattan-clad tree with sticks
• Show off a signed replica Eddie Van Halen guitar 
• Name-drop his D-list pals Erik Estrada and Vivica A. Fox, who show up themselves for roughly 3 minutes (a drinking game based on mentions of Fox’s name will get you thoroughly blitzed)
• Ride with Cool Cat in the Hollywood Christmas Parade, including footage of him filming the proceedings from the parade car
• Stop off at derelict house, take an axe to a closet frame, drag a dry paint roller across a wall, and announce that it’s all part of flipping houses
• Own a house where a gun just randomly shows up in the backyard

Cool Cat Saves the Kids is a bizarre vanity project, a strange venture in which Derek Savage shows that he is just well-connected enough to make it clear that he is not very well-connected. There’s a lot here to make you shake your head and wonder, but what’s not strange at all is the real agenda, and it’s not a laudable one. I’m sorry if that upsets Daddy Derek. Fortunately, I learned an important lesson from watching Cool Cat: if he sends us an angry email, I’ll just hit “delete.” 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“ Watching a fully grown man in a Cat Costume play with an eight year old girl is incredibly unsettling and weird… I’m trying my best to explain the absurdity of a Cat Man running around acting like a child… the perfect example of a movie that’s so bad it’s good movie.” – Aidan White, The Friar’s Lantern

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Where to watch Cool Cat Saves the Kids