BAD KITTY - BAD, BAD KITTY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

AS I AM certain is the case for millions of others, when I was a child, Dr. Seuss' ``The Cat in the Hat'' was my favorite book.

Now they've gone and made a big-budget movie version of it.

Someone is going to pay.

Everything that was sly, charming and instructively subversive about Theodor Geisel's 1957 masterpiece has been made generic, vulgar and destructively ill-mannered on screen. Although some of these same charges were lodged against Ron Howard's film of ``How the Grinch Stole Christmas'' a few years back, that first Seuss adaptation at least had a tone, a script and a lead performance that was consistent and understood the source material and carefully embellished it for modern kid movie sensibilities.

``Cat'' boasts the same team of screenwriters as ``Grinch'' (Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer), a different director (Bo Welch, the esteemed production designer of ``Edward Scissorhands,'' ``A Little Princess'' and many others, here helming his first feature) and Mike Myers instead of Jim Carrey all but unrecognizable beneath a load of costuming and makeup. Howard's business partner, Brian Grazer, again produces.

So how, exactly, this thing went so much more off course than the first Seuss movie is not easy to isolate. Overall, it seems, a general attempt to pander to the lowest common denominator - something Geisel never had to do to achieve massive popular success - appears to have been this hair ball's undoing.

Speaking of which: The film is the kind of betrayal of the book's kooky elegance in which Myers' magical, maniacal talking cat finds it necessary to cough up hair balls. And actually utter the creaky term 'hummana hummana' as if anybody in the past 50 years still thought it was funny. And reference his ``Austin Powers'' movies, among countless other cheap and pointless pop-culture jokes (even Paris Hilton gets name-checked). And need we mention that the squat, puffed-out Myers version of the Cat bears little resemblance to the tall, Astaire-with-hair version Geisel drew? For that matter, I don't recall Geisel ever drawing a feline butt crack, either; you can rest assured that the filmmakers have not overlooked that eventuality.

Myers' anything-goes desperation, however, is somewhat understandable. After all, the thin Seuss book's minimal plot - two bored kids stuck at home on a rainy day are shown by the surrealistic kitty how to have anarchic fun with what's around the house - did need some expanding out to fill even the amount of screen time this short feature film requires.

But what the writers came up with here is depressingly old, um, hat. The sister and brother, Sally (Dakota Fanning) and Conrad (Spencer Breslin), have been turned, respectively, into a stereotypical Miss Fussbudget and a disobedient mess-maker. Their Mom has been expanded from just legs into Kelly Preston, a frazzled single parent and real-estate agent. Her broadly germophobic boss is played by Sean Hayes, who by evidence of this and his recent performance in ``Pieces of April'' really ought to stick to his ``Will & Grace'' small-screen job (Hayes also provides the voice of the film's CGI, nervous-nellie goldfish, at which he's actually much more tolerable).

While we're talking broad, how about Alec Baldwin as the smarmy neighbor Quinn, who wants to marry Mom and pack Conrad off to military school? Now there's an original concept. As for another new character, the children's narcoleptic, thick-spectacled baby-sitter Mrs. Kwan (Amy Hill), the appalling ethnic caricature she represents is somewhat mitigated by the fact that everyone else in the movie is no more than a human cartoon, either.

Cartoonishness is also the keynote for Cat's one minor strength, Alex McDowell's production design. Though Welch's scissorhand is evident in the lawn-loving, pastel uniformity of the movie's suburban setting, McDowell, who designed Spielberg's fabulous ``Minority Report,'' gets some great, disorienting quirkiness in there, especially when the gravity-defying gremlins Thing 1 and Thing 2 go on a tear and an extra-dimensional portal opens up in Conrad and Sally's living room.

Wait a minute. An extra-dimensional portal? In Dr. Seuss? While often implied in Geisel's work, such literal-minded fantasticality is antithetical to the good doctor's imagination-triggering, minimalist sketching. It is, however, endemic to bloated, poorly thought-out and brain-deadening Hollywood business as usual, which is all ``The Cat in the Hat'' movie really has on its mind. As I said at the top, someone has to pay for this. It should not be you, gentle reader, at the box office.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

DR. SEUSS' THE CAT IN THE HAT - One and one half stars

(PG: crude humor, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Mike Myers, Dakota Fanning, Spencer Breslin, Alec Baldwin, Kelly Preston.

Director: Bo Welch.

Running time: 1 hr. 22 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: Barely funny vulgarization of Dr. Seuss' coolest kiddie book.

CAPTION(S):

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Photo:

Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin receive an unexpected houseguest in ``Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat.''