Halle Berry goes from Monster’s Ball to hairball in this piece of shit godawful movie – not my words, but those of one Halle Berry.

Released two years after Berry’s Oscar win, Catwoman has possibly done more damage to the female-fronted superhero genre than Elektra, The Marvels and David Zaslav’s tax bill combined. That Berry’s reputation escaped relatively unscratched is probably more down to her being a good sport (she is one of few actors to accept their Razzie award in person) than her performance, which remains one of the most bizarre turns ever coughed up in front of a paying audience.

This is not necessarily her fault; Berry’s acceptance speech jokingly alludes to the fact she couldn’t understand Pitof, the mononymous French director whose specialism in Visual Effects is reflected in the quality of the performances, if not the visual effects themselves. An overreliance on 2004 CGI gives the action sequences all the integrity of a squeaky toy, while the tone-deaf comedy raises more questions than smiles – why for example do all of Catwoman and her boyfriend’s (Benjamin Bratt) dates take place around children?

That said, Catwoman is not without its feline fun. After Berry is resurrected by magic cats, she develops powers that heighten her every sense except fashion. Then she begins to exhibit catlike behaviour, adopting their taste for milk, attraction to shiny objects and famed ability at basketball. And the plot could not be camper, centred as it is on a beauty company releasing an evil new skin cream that eliminates signs of ageing. Clearly no one thought to test it on the film.

Unfortunately French actor Lambert Wilson is the only player to get the memo (presumably as the only one who could understand Pitof’s direction), delivering the same high-camp creepery he brought to The Matrix Reloaded. Everyone else is left scratching around in the dark, pawing ineffectually at a script that opens with the words “CAT MUMMIES” and only goes downhill from there.

The absence of reality is matched only by the lack of clothing, Berry’s leather outfit pissing all over any empowering messaging (of course bondage-wear can be feminist, but here it reads as studio-mandated concession to the male demographic). Perhaps to avoid comparison to Michelle Pfeiffer’s purrfect version of the character in Batman Returns, this non-Gotham Catwoman is not Selina Kyle but a woman named Patience, and you will surely need it – not due to these cosmetic changes, but because the film neuters the criminality and moral ambiguity that actually makes her Catwoman.

Ironically it is only really bad-movie curiosity that saves this sloggy moggy from total obscurity, although next to Tom Hooper’s Cats it looks like Kittyzen Kane.