The Black Cat (1981)
Somehow or other this movie from Lucio Fulci (Sodoma's Ghost, Touch Of Death) lost my interest as soon as it started and we had to sit through four minutes of opening credits that consisted of watching this black cat running around town doing whatever it is possessed devil-cats do in their down time. I knew instinctively (probably from a lifetime of having cats as pets and knowing that by and large they do little more than shoot you dirty looks and occasionally pass devil-gas whenever they get bored with their boring existence) that this movie was going to force me to take an early bedtime.
So I put the disc in, settled in on the couch and prepared to have the dickens scared out of me. It was about twelve minutes in when I started dozing off. (Just after some goofus was tricked by this dastardly cat into wrecking his car and getting tossed through the windshield. I guess the cat tricked him into not wearing his seat belt as well.)
By the nineteen minute mark I was completely lost as to what was happening because the moronic nature of this movie was so soothing that I was barely cognizant of my surroundings. Thirty minutes in, I had to shut things down completely and then passed out on the couch.
The next morning, I was all refreshed and had a gigantic mug of Diet Mountain Dew (if a gal doesn't watch her figure, who will?) in my hand, bound and determined to finish the final hour of this scrawny and no doubt rabid stray.
Basically this is a slasher movie with this 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 looking to bring this pussy to justice. Oh and when he's not working on the photographer, he's also trying to catch this killer cat. Don't bother complaining, I hate myself worse than you ever could. Anyway, the movie is a series of badly staged killings, followed by badly staged filler between said killings.
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 "Ohmigod! 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 its setting someone's house on fire, are just laughable. I don't really blame the cat. It must have used it's cat's intuition to dope out the fact that the material it was working with was more limp than the kitten the neighbors ran over last week. (You know, these kitties play out in the street by my house at all hours of the day and I'm always worried that they're going to get run over and it turns out the only people that squash them are the idiots that actually own them.)
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. 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.