Phil and his son Chris have a strained relationship. Post-Eric-Robers-voice-over-opening, A Talking Cat!?! begins when Phil returns to his echoey home early.
Jeez, okay. We need to talk about the sound. Aside from the sugary synthesized score of Harry Manfredini, the sound quality is the first truly horrible thing to slap you in the head. As soon as Phil turns the handle of the front door, the reverberations of its metallic clicks shoot back and forth across the cavernous expanse of his spacial entryway.
For the recording of dialogue, a film would normally have a boom operator holding a fluffy microphone over or under an actor’s head to capture their voice and nothing else. The sound effects (such as a door opening or footsteps) would be added later by a foley artist.
But if you’re going to make a film for a million dollars, you need to work with a skeleton crew. And if you can’t find a necromancer to raise up the dead to work for you, you have to use a scaled back crew. That means no boom mics and no foley artist.
What we get is a single mic, probably mounted on top of the camera, capturing every last sound made in a house that doesn’t even have carpeting for sound dampening.
I was going to talk about Phil and Chris in the post, but the sound takes so many missteps from moment one it needs to be brought up.
But here’s a fantastic bit of dialogue, to hold you over until the Phil and Chris update.
Phil: It’s over.
Chris: What’s over?
Phil: The company.
Obviously, Chris, you dummy. What else would Phil be bringing up for the first time ever?