Boy, “Catwoman” is sure going to suck. There’s really no two ways about it, is there? Not even if Halle Berry improves on her “Swordfish” performance and somehow manages to reveal even more would this movie be worth the price of admission to anyone but leather fetishists and fans of cat-based puns (strangely, the two seem to correlate quite often).

The cards seem to have been stacked against this flick from the beginning; whoever made the decision to make Berry’s costume look like an off-the-rack “Sexy Cat Gal” costume from the Theatrical Shop needs an intervention, and quick, because that kind of decision doesn’t come from just one kind of substance abuse, but rather a variety of them.

Then, someone in a tall glass building, possibly suffering from lack of oxygen, decided to make THIS Catwoman completely different from the Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman, to take away the connections to Batman and make the character a hero, rather than a vinyl-clad psychopath who whips people.

Well, I can understand the need to take Batman out of the flick. Joel Shumacher has made it so most people associate the Dark Knight with rubber nipples and Uma Thurman, neither of which are, as a rule, appealing to the normal human. But why dump the character’s perfectly LOGICAL origin (she was pushed out of a building by Christopher Walken and went crazy, a situation that happens to more and more of us each day) with what sounds, from the previews, to be a story concept every bit as quality as the free-form poetry of a depressed 14-year-old girl.

The story, from what I was able to retain, seems to center around the concept of cats being connected with death somehow. This concept is derived from many places, being part Ancient Egyptian myth, part “The Crow” rip-off, and part THC influence. It seems that cats, when they’re not licking their own butts and ignoring people, sometimes also bring slighted souls back from the dead to dress in dumb costumes and run around in painful-looking high-heels kicking ne’er-do-wells.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to die knowing that my eternal repose is going to be judged and processed by cats. I’ve had cats. They’re shiftless, stupid, weird animals that poop in boxes, yarf up moist wads with no warning and spread hair all over everything. Do you think it’ll be easy to get cat hair off your soul? You think they have lint rollers in the hereafter? I don’t want to take that chance.

But it seems as though the cats that brought Ms. Berry back also made her half cat, which means she has increased reflexes, big irises, and a strong desire to clean herself with her tongue. With these things, she wages a war on crime and loose ends of yarn, fighting a one-woman war for justice and stronger clumping.

And yet, it’s really none of these things that I take issue with. My problem is with calling this film “Catwoman.”

You can’t take well-known characters, completely rearrange them, and just expect the public to swallow it. If I made a movie called “Spider-Man” a few years from now, and it drew record crowds the first weekend, and it ended up being about a man who grows six extra limbs and crawls around entrapping people, releasing webbing from his abdomen and sucking the life-juices from their trembling bodies, how would you feel? I’ll tell you how you’d feel: You’d feel angry and frustrated and gassy, and you’d have every right to.

With all indicators pointing strongly toward suck, we can only hope that someone found the time to get Catwoman neutered, so she won’t reproduce.