Cat's Eye (1985)

Oh no! Stephen King's Cat's Eye! It's a cat-themed Creepshow.

It opens with some shots of cats running around, and then one being chased across town by a filthy, bloody St. Bernard. The cat is a pretty good actor. The music is going nuts, trying to really get us more excited about a cat chase than it possibly deserves. Kitty hitches a ride on the back of a delivery truck and gets shipped to Manhattan, and is given a vague mission by the disembodied ghost that inhabits a little girl's mannequin. Some random guy immediately stuffs the cat into a cat carrier that he happened to have and takes it into the same building that pre-crazy Videodrome-era businessman James Woods is entering, a smoking cessation company called "Quitters, Inc." The other people in the waiting room are suffering from some manner of psychosis.

The sadistic leader of Quitters, Inc smashes James' cigarettes, then shows him a box where he's electrocuting our opening scene's cat to an exciting musical soundtrack. He says his employees will spy on James Woods henceforth, and electrocute his wife and kid in the cat electrocution room if he sneaks a smoke, and rape them if he lapses a second time. James goes home and worries, considers sneaking a smoke, and gets spooked by a weirdo crouching in his closet. Hey, remember that cat ghost mission? Me too, I wonder what that was about.

James goes to a party and hallucinates everyone and everything smoking from every orifice. He incompetently sneaks a smoke on the drive home anyway, and it's straight to the kitty shock box for his wife. James tries to get his wife back with violence, accidentally knocking the cat out of its cage. It runs away, maybe to solve a ghost mystery? James is held at gunpoint while his wife is tortured to the beat.

They tell him they'll cut off his wife's finger if he gains weight. In the next scene, somewhere in the future, he notices his wife is missing a finger and is shocked. This dumb and illogical moment fades into the second part of the triptych: the cat's now in New Jersey getting commands from the same ghost girl floating over a TV. Kitty runs over to a casino and gets picked up by a mobster, the levitating fat Harkonnen from Lynch's Dune, getting into a limo.

The mobster forces the guy his wife is sleeping with to climb around the ledge of a high-rise penthouse; he gets to keep the girl if he makes it around. This whole segment is him walking along the ledge, and all of the various Harkonnen/cat/bird scares that make him almost stumble. A pigeon pecks him in the ankle for most of the way. Ledge man wins the bet and gets the wife, but her head is off. The cat kicks him a pistol for revenge and runs off.

The cat rides a train to North Carolina? These are some awful segment transitions. The camera takes the first-person view of an unseen Gremlin-height creature that snarfs like Nibbler from Futurama. The gremlin runs into a suburban house, the cat runs after it, and a tiny little child-actress Drew Barrymore celebrates getting a cat. The gremlin turns out to be a stop-motion lizard-faced court jester creature with jingling bells on its hat. It eats Drew's parakeet, the cat chases it around, and the mom thinks the cat is the villain. It's just the plot of Pluto's Christmas Tree with a demon garden gnome instead of Chip n' Dale.

The demon slowly sucks Drew Barrymore's child-steam out while she sleeps.

Cat and jester gremlin duke it out with kids toys while the parents yell and bang helplessly on her thin bedroom door. Cat wins, gremlin explodes, parents suddenly believe in house demons. Oh, Drew Barrymore was the ghost from before, though there's no reason still-living, suburban North Carolinian Drew should have been ghost-inhabiting a mannequin in Manhattan to communicate with stray cats.