Christopher Walken says he did another musical movie of the kids’ story, Puss in Boots, and he is still talking about it like a lost treasure. “Which nobody ever saw, but it’s good,” he said of the 1988 film, adding, “It’s actually one of my best performances, I think.”
Walken went even further, saying, “Nobody’s seen it, but it’s really one of my better ones.” The comments put fresh attention on a film that never had much of a chance to find an audience in the United States: Puss in Boots was a musical fantasy that was not given a theatrical release there and was quietly shuffled out later on home video and television.
In the film, Walken plays a cat who transforms into a man whenever he puts on the titular footwear, a premise as off-the-wall as it sounds. The songs are described as awful, and the choreography as enough to trigger full-body cringe, but that is part of the odd charm for viewers who stumble onto it years later. Walken has amassed hundreds of credits over the years, and by his own reputation he has appeared in many films he has not bothered to watch.
That leaves him in a rare position: one of the most recognizable actors in the cast, and the loudest defender of a movie most people never knew existed. He is also, among the people involved with Gigli, its most vocal defender, even as that film found some cult appreciation among the so bad it’s good crowd in the 20-plus years since its release.
For Puss in Boots, the judgment is harsher and simpler. Released in 1988 and denied the kind of launch that turns a film into a lasting title, it vanished before most audiences had a chance to form an opinion. Walken’s praise now does what the original release never did: it brings the movie back into view, and suggests he has no doubts about where it belongs in his own work.
