The word that most accurately describes P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, Steve Guttenberg's directorial debut, is "dire." Guttenberg adapts James Kirkwood Jr.'s humanist black comedy–a perennial for regional theaters and drama-class exercises–and drains all the recognizable humanity out of it, turning it into a morose, unlikable reflection of its sad-sack lead character. Guttenberg also plays that character, an unsuccessful actor and would-be novelist whose girlfriend has just left him, and whose apartment has been burgled twice in recent months. On New Year's Eve, the burglar (played by Lombardo Boyar) strikes again, but Guttenberg catches him in the act, ties him to the kitchen counter, and proceeds to take out all of his anger with the universe. Or at least he threatens to. The dramatic arc of Kirkwood's story requires Guttenberg to get to know Boyar (a gay man and a father, both traits that surely made the character more interesting when Kirkwood wrote this piece in the early '70s), and to use his newfound compassion and assertiveness to help him get over his girlfriend and get his nagging rich aunt to cut him some slack. Since the film version of P.S. Your Cat Is Dead runs about 90 minutes, and covers the events of only one evening, Guttenberg's character develops quickly. He's brandishing a butcher knife one minute and having a heart-to-heart with Boyar the next; it's more of a plot outline than a movie, and it's incredibly unfunny. The comedy curdles from the opening minutes, which show Guttenberg getting fired from his sole acting gig, a one-man version of Hamlet performed with puppets. How did Guttenberg get that gig in the first place, given that the show's premise is so plainly stupid? For that matter, how did he ever get a girlfriend, given that he's such a mopey, disheveled twerp? Well-directed productions of P.S. Your Cat Is Dead exploit the exaggerated humor to make the lead character an identifiable, put-upon everyman; in Guttenberg's version, he and everyone around him come off as shrill, vulgar jerks. At one point, while Boyar is left alone in the apartment with a classical-music CD playing, the disc starts to skip. The repetitive digital blip noise is no less grating than anything else in the picture.