I hate this movie.

THE CAT IN THE HAT, by the way, was so intolerably bad that I sat through an hour of a midnight showing last night and walked out. The management of the theater told me that they understood I'd wanted to see the sold-out GOTHIKA show instead, didn't like the fact that six-year-olds got into a fistfight at the MIDNIGHT show and didn't like the shitty kitty movie at all.

THE CAT IN THE HAT is pointless and horrible. It takes the funny, charming book and removes all the fun, humor and charm from it. It replaces it with a completely unlikable lead character, potty humor and a bloated, unnecessarily convoluted plot. Visually, it's overdone, attempting a sort of EDWARD SCISSORHANDS-ish beauty and failing miserably. (EDWARD SCISSORHANDS created a place you wanted to visit. THE CAT IN THE HAT doesn't at all.) I didn't laugh once. I wanted to punch Mike Myers in the face for stealing the Cowardly Lion's laugh from THE WIZARD OF OZ without permission. I wanted to watch BEETLEJUICE to remind myself that I once liked Alec Baldwin with good reason. I wanted to remove the film from Spencer Breslin and Dakota Fanning's permanent records. I wondered if I could involve DFACS in a probe of the child actors' families. I wanted to call Dr. Seuss' widow bad names for allowing the project to even be made. But the only person I could save from the debacle was myself.

So I walked out. I got an emergency pass to see another movie at a different time. (The management agreed with me that the movie and the viewing experience I had with it were worthy of a refund.)

I was talking to a parent in my store about it today. She'd just finished watching it with her two-year-old daughter. Since we didn't want the little girl to hear bad language when we talked about the movie, we put headphones on the girl and kept all the four-letter-words we used to a whisper. She said that, if she hadn't had a two-year-old, she would've walked out, too.

It's bad. Really bad. Horrible bad. In just over 80 minutes, they manage to screw up everything delightful about what is a brilliant, excellent children's book. There must be a special place reserved in hell for the people behind this movie.

See something else. Anything else. Really.