The Sextortions in Wolf Cat Fever (all images courtesy of Zombie Zoo Productions)

What do you get when you toss together the lurching, microphone-fellating, teenage werewolf-y-OOOOO-wling of The Cramps; Cry-Baby and Rock ‘n’ Roll High School’s reverence for rock’s sacred duty of horrifying the squares; the living cartoon world of Pee-wee’s Playhouse and its progeny, Hunx and His Punx’s music videos; and a hefty dash of randy fursonas—fierce pussies, lusty lupines, a drumming bat named Batusi, and one jumpsuit-wearing rum-tum tiger royal? Out of this guaranteed recipe for fantastical filth comes the luridly low-budget new trash-sploitation film, Wolf Cat Fever.

Directed by Josh ‘Sinbad’ Collins, alongside his fellow producer, costume and character designer, and partner-in-crime Babzotica, Wolf Cat Fever is an overheated, overstimulated tribute to rock-and-roll sleaze, which has been making its way through screenings and film festivals around Australia, Europe, the U.K., and finally comes to the US this fall. Though populated by furries, Wolf Cat Fever’s plot is not all that complicated. Surly, guitar-shredding, fire-locked feline, Furr Fever (Em Bleby), who can’t stand anything soft, has a (car-)smashing meet-cute with one-half-hillbilly, one-half-punk Wolfy Howl (Finn Burgett), whose lip-curling drawl and blue-black hair make him appear like Elvis’s long-lost lupine lovechild, after their own solo fits of delinquency at a roadside saloon and a love emporium. The couple takes their newfound mutual adoration on the road to—where else?—a casino, where Furr livens up the joint with her lethal guitar that doubles as a weapon, a blessing from the late monarch with the striped pompadour, The King. King is played by a perfectly cast Les Greene, the throwback wailer who channels the energy and style of Little Richard and James Brown and whose legendary performances I’ve had to frustratingly miss every time he’s in New York. Luckily, Greene’s The King haunts the entire film, waiting (im)patiently to avenge his death at the claws of the grifting, cartoonishly evil, cigar-smoking pug manager Rosetta (a scenery-chewing Justine Jones whose gigantic teeth are a character on their own) who has a nasty habit of nuking her successful clients. He gets his chance after Furr, Wolfy, and their two new musically (and sometimes, criminally) inclined buds, Batusi (Pablo Andres) and blacklight drug user/thief Weasel Ferret (Saša Čuha), link up to create a ferocious garage rock band, The Sextortions. What happens next is a familiar tragedy: managerial creep, music business exploitation, bad contracts with not-so-fine print, New Wave synth sellouts, and a campaign song for a corrupt scammer populist. Thankfully, the ever-present King is always watching—and gives The Sextortions and himself a rip-roaring opportunity for rock retaliation.

The King (Les Greene) and his angels

While Wolfy and Furr do go deep in one scene about their upbringing (Wolfy was “raised in a dirty trash can on the wrong side of the tracks…it was great,” while Furr suffered the indignity of middle-class law school dreams), before launching into some more heavy petting and pegging at a drive-in, the film mainly consists of propulsive wacko antics interspersed with The Sextortions tearing through a variety of venues, ranging from a tiki bar to a graveyard to a local fair music competition, where they go against their squealing rivals, The Wieners. Because music lies at the heart of the film, the quality of The Sextortions’ tunes could make or break Wolf Cat Fever. Mercifully, from Furr’s sneering introductory “I Won’t Be Your Pussy Cat” to the wolf-in-Grandma’s clothing, “Grandma Go-Go-Go,” the band faithfully sounds like they crawled out from the same rat-infested sewer where The Cramps recorded their recently released 1977 recordings. At its best, rockabilly and garage rock make me want to shimmy down the sidewalk, scaring passersby and nicking overpriced inflated beef from the supermarket, like Babs in Pink Flamingos. Well, just try to listen to “High Heels and Mini Skirt,” a Dean Johnson-like ode to cross-dressing, without rifling through your closet for those dusty stilettos to go teetering down the street! Girl can’t help it! No wonder The Sextortions make their audiences turn into eucalyptus-devouring koalas or humping bunnies.

Wolfy and Furr rip up “High Heels and Miniskirt”

As should be obvious by now, much of the broad and campy humor in Wolf Cat Fever derives from the characters’ species-specific behavior, like Furr hacking up a dripping hairball after a long night of hard milk and scratchy sex. There are also copious groany, silly fuzzy puns. Take the names of musicians like The Beagles, Bruce Springbock, and Justin Beaver. Humans don’t escape the ribbing either. In one of my favorite scenes, two women stand next to a bland Brancusi-like sculpture asking each other: “Art?” Art,” one confirms. Well, after determining the sculpture was, in fact, art, what else is there to do other than whip out their phones for an art selfie, declaring, “Me and art”? An oddball impulse I witness every time I visit a museum (I sometimes take sneaky pics of the art selfie-r to amuse myself). What are these people getting out of this?

Flying in the face of this removed engagement with art, Wolf Cat Fever doesn’t balk at its own overt fanaticism. In fact, with Furr and Wolfy’s signature looks mirroring the glamorous grime of Lux Interior and Poison Ivy, the movie could be interpreted as a filmic fan fiction about The Cramps. Wolf Cat Fever is cognizant of its demented devotion too, given all the references to or spins on Cramps recordings (“drug train”; “Can your pussy do the wolf?”; “a new kinda lick”), sprinkled throughout the entire film like catnip for bad-music-for-bad-people enthusiasts. The filth elders here are not just sonic. Wolf Cat Fever also plays glorious tribute to the best of neon-lit B-movie bad taste, including the horny low-budg graveyards of Ed Wood’s Orgy of the Dead; the deadly desert pussycats of Russ Meyer; a (bull) dyke on bike named Tura for Tura Satana; John Waters’s hair-hoppers, including one that resembles peroxide killer Myra Hindley; and the artsy raunch of Stephen Sayadian.

Furr Fever and Tura the bull take a joy ride

Notably, Sayadian seems to be emerging as an unlikely forefather for a new generation of sleaze denizens. Alongside Wolf Cat Fever, there is also transgressive newcomer porn mongers, alterotics’ Rat Trap, recently screened at Roxy Theater’s Musclefest, which clearly found influence in Sayadian’s hyper-posed depravity. Rat Trap is a horny twist on congresswoman-turned-tattooed-biker-moll Nancy Mace’s scare tactics about taxpayer-funded trans rats that is so explicit it shocked even me. Like Wolf Cat Fever, Rat Trap also features an anthropomorphic rodent protagonist who scampers around Whole Foods cheese counters before she’s turned into a scientific sex mutant. Between these films, Taeer M.’s roach+world at Company Gallery, and Gianluca Cameron’s You Know It’s Black, what is WITH all these furries all of a sudden? My theory is this influx of demi-humans represents a return to the beastly creatures we are at heart as a refusal of our forthcoming, trillionaire-imposed, Neuralink-like merging with machines!

Wolf Cat Fever more directly offers a rejection of the slick digital fetish with its maniacally maximalist DIY aesthetic. Is clearly building your film’s world from materials scrounged from the bin even more subversive in the age of AI? I certainly think so! It’s as if Collins and crew threw together every born-to-be-cheap form of practical effects they could imagine. Comic-like animated action sequences! Flapping butterfly scene changes! Stop-motion action shots of numerous car wrecks! A vulture puppet! Tacky painted backdrops! Miniature coyote-owned saloons made out of splinters of wood! Ridiculous oversized props, like Wolfy’s heart-eyed glasses, X-ray spex, and giant tongue worn when first peeping his pussycat Furr! In its creative excess and harkening back to live-action cartoons, like the wonderfully camp 1960s Batman, the movie reminds me of Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, a film I tragically wanted to like much more than I did. Still, while I was put off by the Joker communicating in Internet-poisoned therapy speak, even I couldn’t deny Drew’s admirably gonzo approach to cinema. Luckily, Wolf Cat Fever doesn’t get bogged down in deeper meaning about trauma or even complete relevancy. Is a movie about old-school rock antics with a clear distaste for synths a bit out of step with the culture in 2026? Sure, but who gives a fuck! Who couldn’t use an electrifying, ball-crushing, head-stomping return to untamed rock ‘n’ roll and sweet revenge?!