Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

Catfight Blu-ray Movie Review

Me - OW!

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 15, 2017

Is it politically incorrect to say watching two women slug it out in what would otherwise be typified as a testosterone fueled rage can be absolutely hilarious? Catfight has a number of knock down, drag out fights, often with some pretty gruesome sound effects and supposed injury, but because the combatants are harridan modern artist Ashley (Anne Heche) and tony upper west side Manhattan wife Veronica (Sandra Oh), as vicious as the battle indisputably is, it’s also often laugh out loud funny. Fists are thrown (and land with force, at least according to the sound effects), bones crunch, blood flows, and at various times (since this film is full of such hand to hand moments) each of the fighters ends up in a coma, and yet Catfight still qualifies as a comedy. An ultra black comedy, to be sure, but one with some significant laughs that may admittedly cause some viewers to ponder, “Why does this strike me as funny?” Writer-director Onur Tukel, whose included commentary is about as scabrous as the film itself, has a long line of basically uncategorizable films to his credit, including such disparate fare as Summer of Blood and Applesauce , and he continues with his bizarre and frankly even gonzo proclivities in this film. While the conflict between Veronica and Ashley provides the core of the film’s story, there’s background content that involves conflict of a more global variety, namely a kind of generic war in the Middle East that initially seems to be a boon for the fortunes of Veronica’s contractor husband, but which then spills out into unforeseen directions in what some might perceive as a too on the nose depiction of how “intimate” skirmishes can grow into something unmanageable. Tukel definitely has a point of view, though, and for those with a certain skewed sense of humor, Catfight may well be one of the more weirdly enjoyable films of recent memory.

The film’s structure is itself kind of a ping pong match of sorts, ricocheting between vignettes dealing with Veronica, who’s married to Stanley (Damian Young) and mother to Kip (Giullian Yao Gioiello), and Ashley, who’s in a somewhat troubled relationship with Lisa (Alicia Silverstone). Veronica drinks too much, something that spills into her family dynamic, and she’s also almost obnoxiously diffident about her son’s obvious artistic talents. When she mentions she had a college friend who thought she was an artist but who never made much of herself (in an obvious anecdote meant to “wake” Kip out of his artistic ambitions), it’s not hard to figure out she’s probably talking about Ashley, which soon turns out to be the case. If Veronica is a sloppy drunk who’s kind of offensively dismissive, Ashley is downright objectionable as an employer, especially with how she treats her ostensible assistant Sally (Ariel Kavoussi), a baby voiced younger woman who delights in painting “happy blue bunnies” while Ashley struggles over depictions that resemble Hieronymus Bosch on an especially bad acid trip.

At a combo celebration for Stanley’s firm getting a huge contract courtesy of the “new, improved” Middle East War and a birthday party for one of his partners, Veronica, who has promised Stanley she won’t drink, of course ends up at the bar, where Ashley is helping Lisa, the caterer for the event. The initial confrontation between the two is of the fake polite variety, though subtle barbs are thrown and there’s an unspoken awareness of the obvious class differences between the two. When Stanley discovers that Veronica is “hammered” (in his words), he orders her to go home so that she won’t embarrass him, but when an elevator doesn’t come quickly enough, she bursts through the door to the stairwell, where unfortunately Ashley has just retreated to have a quick puff of marijuana to keep her nerves under control. An obviously accidental collision quickly escalates into all out conflict, with both women very badly bloody and bruised. That then leads to the first real segue forward, when Veronica wakes up from a coma some two years afterward to discover everything she knew about her former life has changed.

Part of that change is due to the escalation of the Middle East war, something that in turn has suddenly made Ashley’s disturbing art all the rage among the elite cognoscenti. The roles have obviously reversed, but not for the last time. Without spoiling the perhaps overly natty reflective qualities that Tukel’s screenplay delights in, suffice it to say that the various levels of “success” and class distinctions between Veronica and Ashley continue to vary as if the two were on some kind of cosmic seesaw. And of course at several moments, the two engage in interstitial punching matches that leave them both devastated physically and emotionally.

Tukel’s political subtext is never fully fleshed out, consigned largely to allusions as well as a running gag featuring a late night television host (Craig Bierko) who cracks wise about the conflict (over the course of many years) before bringing out his show’s signature comedy element, “The Fart Machine” (a fat guy in a cape who, yep, is repetitively flatulent, usually to the absolute delight of the studio audience and whomever is watching the tv in any given scene). It’s obviously juvenile, but it has a certain trenchant point about entertainment, “infotainment” and the curious mashup of global conflict and television coverage that some may find curiously apropos of our current world situation.

If some of Tukel’s formulations are pat, the film is never less than intriguing, and it features two assured if at times inherently unlikable performances by Oh and Heche as women with seemingly nothing better to do than bash each other’s brains out at regular intervals. There are a number of other supporting characters who wander through the film, including an underwritten aunt (Amy Hill) of Veronica’s whose literal tree hugging tendencies are never artfully woven into the story. Catfight might never really hit the bullseye in terms of some of the evident political points Tukel wants to make, but in its own way it’s a rather unforgettable documenting of man’s inhumanity to man, or perhaps more appropriately in this case, woman’s inhumanity to woman.

Catfight Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Catfight is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. The IMDb lists Red cameras were used for this shoot, and while detail levels are routinely high, the look of this feature, whether intentionally so or not, is a bit more on the "video" side than some other digitally captured offerings. The palette is also often slightly blanched, with brightness levels seemingly boosted, if only minimally, leading to a somewhat anemic, wintry look that actually suits the cold emotional tenor of the film quite well. That coolness extends to the overall grading of the film, which is often toward blue or slate gray. All of this can tend to add the perception of softness to certain moments, though especially in some extreme close-ups, fine detail is excellent (including some kind of stomach churning looks at various facial injuries the combatants sustain). I personally could have used a bit more defined contrast, but there are no issues with image instability or compression anomalies.

Catfight Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Catfight's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks gets good intermittent workouts courtesy of not just the repeated fight scenes, but a number of noisy crowd sequences that include the party where Ashley and Veronica first reunite, and later gatherings like an art show (where another fight breaks out, leading to the high falutin' audience concluding they've just witnessed "brilliant" performance art, in one of the film's funnier skewerings). Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly, and the occasional source cue is spread around the side and rear channels.

Catfight Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Fight Choreography (HD; 17:23) details some of the impressively staged battle scenes.


• Deleted Scenes (HD; 17:44)


• Trailer (HD; 2:12)


• Audio Commentary with Writer-Director Onur Tukel


• Audio Commentary with "Oh Heche"

A typically nicely done insert booklet also includes writing by Tukel, with one piece being a kind of first person comic strip detailing his aims with the film. The other piece, though listed as written by Tukel, refers to him in the third person, so I'm wondering if perhaps someone else wrote that one. The booklet also has a gallery of "angry art" that is weirdly captivating.

Catfight Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's little doubt that Catfight is quite simply one of those "WTF" films that comes along every so often and pretty much willfully defies easy description. Oh and Heche are nicely matched here, and the film has a lot of pretty trenchant material, some of which lands (no pun intended), and some of which kind of misses its intended target. It's weird, wacky, and for some, it will be quite wonderful. Technical merits are strong, and at least for those with blacker than black senses of humor, Catfight comes Recommended.