Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat (2004) User Reviews

Not offensive, just boring.

[GabrielX · 4/10 · 14 September 2004]

The biggest problem with this film was not the subject matter, but rather that is was boring. The filmmaker failed to ask the really tough questions on the morality of art, and instead walked the easier "exploratory" line and in the end said not much.

This had the possibility of being a great film, a real critique of art and the culture of art, and just never made it past the clichés.

It could have also used some more editing, as 20 or 30 minutes could have been easily cut from the film to make it a somewhat more compelling hour long film.

Shame, because I was looking forward to it, too.

Average film

[killerspud · 3/10 · 24 July 2005]

I was at the Melbourne Film Festival where for the first time in my experience you had to be searched by the police before entering the theatre - such was the controversy this film has caused.

The protesters outside had grievances with the content and claimed it was an animal 'snuff' film (naturally none of them had seen it and were going by the poor write up in the festival guide that did serve to sensationalise it). That is certainly wasn't. What it tried to do was portray a completely neutral balanced view of an event where three men decide to brutally kill a cat. What the film did well was not try to cast judgement on the characters and let them speak for themselves. And any one with half a brain could see that the pitiful excuse for this act - that it was name in the name of art and to show up the hypocrisy of people in terms of eating cows and not cats - was a cover for some very disturbed human beings with a terrible dark side.

Where the film failed was as a film - poorly shot, poorly edited and constructed. There was an overriding feeling that the film makers weren't sure of what they were doing and the film left you cold. The people in the film - especially Jesse Powers just seemed like people out to shock for the hell of it - it was not art in any way shape or form and I could not find any empathy with them.

Having said all this - there are millions of people dying needlessly around the world everyday. That a group of people in Melbourne wanted to protest a documentary film about the death of one cat (in admittedly heinous circumstances) just showed up the bourgeois nature of those who live in the comfortable west who can afford to waste time on such things.

Disgusting, repulsive , morally reprehensible

[Tile99 · 22 September 2018]

Anyone who makes a documentary about such a horrific, inhumane, repulsive, morally reprehensible act is condoning it and might as well have done it themselves. There SHOULD BE a lot of fuss made about this film and the footage which inspired it because it's horrific! That this wasn't immediately seen as a horrific crime is a sad statement on the world we live in and humanity itself. Does no one see that these three men, lead by Jesse Power, are deranged and a serious threat to society at large? It's a matter of time before they do it again to another animal or a person. They are seriously mentally disturbed and should be locked away where they can't do this again. Where is the human decency and compassion for an innocent, helpless, defenseless, trusting animal which was probably someone's pet?! Does no one see that these three men are potential psychopaths? For the judge to say that 'there are worse ways for a cat to die', and for the gallery owners to say 'who are they to say what is or isn't art', what kind of world do we live in? And for a fellow reviewer to say that the act itself was a 'tad bit much', that's a smug, arrogant SOB. Anyone who's actually interested in viewing this documentary or the original footage is probably harboring sick, demented, twisted tendencies and is dangerous. That includes the people who made this documentary. The inhumanity is astounding! May Jesse Powers and his two accomplices perish in the same horrifying, brutal way they killed that poor defenseless, helpless cat - skinned alive, disemboweled with dental tools and eyes gauged out - because that's exactly what they deserve. Shame on you, Toronto!!!

I cannot see what all the fuss is about...

[johnnycourageous · 7/10 · 24 July 2005]

Controversy seems to have greeted this documentary everywhere it has screened, and its selection for the Melbourne International Film Festival was no exception. I had to run the gauntlet of a bunch of bleating, ill-informed animal activists who were making false claims that the organisers of the film festival were supporting a 'cat snuff film'. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is NOT a 'cat snuff film' - such claims would be laughable if they were not completely ridiculous and untrue.

I find such premature condemnation irritating in the extreme. It is as clear as there is a nose of your face that the people so strongly opposed to this documentary have not a single clue as to what it actually contains. It does NOT contain the graphic components of the cat killing film in question. It does feature, however, a detailed and confronting written description of the film's content, by way of a written scroll giving a minute-by-minute description of its content. The audience is thankfully spared the real footage of the crime.

Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat is a documentary, pure and simple - and I found it a very well balanced and objective one for that matter. It was very thought provoking. It features interviews with the cat killing criminals, as well as animal activists and an investigating policeman, among many others. It also highlights the killer's defence that it was some sort of 'work of art', especially given that one of them had previously made other films depicting animal cruelty in the name of 'art'.

There is some footage of one of the killer's earlier film 'art' works, including dancing with the corpse of a pig obtained from an abattoir, and a peculiar music video featuring dancing skinned animals from a research laboratory. Perhaps the most confronting was the short depiction of the beheading of a small live chicken. All of this imagery was presented in context, and was neither condoning the acts, nor suggestive of such inclusions as being some form of entertainment. It was featured in this documentary to balance out the killer's argument that the filming of the cat's torture was not a precedent setter, but one that had occurred within the context of his previous 'art works' - a nonsense argument in my opinion.

As a viewer, I was left feeling a sense of scorn and pity upon the perpetrators of this act - one of whom seemed to frequent minimise the severity of it, with lines of argument such as: "well, we were drugged out" and "we kill animals for meat, so what's the problem". They seemed mainly well spoken and articulate individuals, but ones that seemed to lack a sense of morality, consequence, responsibility and a honed capacity for knowing when to draw the line with certain reasonable or acceptable behaviours. I think most reasonable adults would agree that the deliberate infliction of real pain on human or animal, regardless of intent, is a tad bit intolerable.

Speaking of what is intolerable, the session I attended contained a hefty presence of police and security personnel, after the cinema received some veiled threats. If animal activists think that threatening innocent cinema-goers - who are merely exercising their right to see what they wish - somehow increases the validity of their arguments, then they are sorely misguided and utterly deluded.