This is a slasher movie from Lucio Fulci (The House by the Cemetery) with a black cat playing the part of the slasher. It actually doesn’t really make as much sense as all that, but none of the rest of the parts in the movie ever seemed to add up to anything beyond their apparent disconnectedness, so that’s what I managed to boil things down to.
You see, there is this cat and he runs around terrorizing people and by terrorizing people I mean he runs after folks, stares at them and growls. He also scratches people, but that could describe any number of cats that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing over the years so I’m not sure why I was supposed to be to worried about what this one was up to.
There’s a nosy lady photographer who notices that some of the bodies of the murder victims that are turning up around town have scratch marks on their hands and immediately figures out that the string of killings must be linked to the black cat that hangs out with the guy in the village who’s a self-proclaimed medium.
This guy spends his time at the cemetery hooking microphones up to tombstones and saying stuff like “Caller? Are you there? Go ahead caller. Turn your coffin down please.”
There’s also a hotshot detective from Scotland Yard who hunks his way into town and when he’s not working on the photographer, he’s also trying to catch this killer cat.
The problem with this movie is that this cat is doing stuff like chasing people around so that they end up falling onto spikes and junk like that and I’m just thinking, why in the hell is anyone running away from this cat?
I understand running away from some big, mean, old dog (shoot, my trailer park has lost about three little kids in the last month because somebody’s pit bull was having a bad day), but no matter what, have you ever seen a stray cat wandering around and thought “Oh my god! I hope it doesn’t see me!” or hurried to your destination hoping that the cat wouldn’t catch you and scratch you?
Usually in these animal movies, you can at least count on the starring animal to deliver a good performance, but this movie is so worthless, even the cat in the title role isn’t convincing. You never get the feeling that this cat was doing this film for any reason other than the fact that it was getting fed about once a week.
Some shots where it’s sitting around trying to look menacing, it just looks bored and even its big scenes like where it’s busting its ass to unlock a door or when it’s setting someone’s house on fire, are just laughable.
It turns out that the medium was using mind control on this cat to get him to do his nasty deeds and that the medium tried to kill the cat, but that didn’t take and the cat just kept going on his rampage.
It really only makes sense so long as you don’t think about it for longer than a millisecond. But if you were dumb enough to, you might ask how was he able to control the cat? How did the cat escape death? How was the cat able to kill all these people? How did the cat escape this guy’s control? Why was this guy controlling the cat in the first place? Why was he wanting all these people killed? Why doesn’t this guy take the cat to the pound?
None of these questions are even raised in the movie, let alone answered. The movie simply kills off a few people, blames the cat, tells us the medium is involved somehow and that’s it. If you ever have had a cat breathe on you after licking its butt, you’ll understand the kind of experience watching this movie is.
© 2014 MonsterHunter
