Not Coming to a Theater Near You
There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.
There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.
A guy has got to be pretty head-over-heels in love to marry a woman who won’t even let him kiss her. But if the woman was Simone Simon, and she looked up at you with those radiant teary eyes, you might marry her too. Simon plays Irina, a Serbian immigrant convinced that any passionate encounter will turn her into a panther, due to a curse placed on her village generations ago. Her new husband, Oliver, is convinced that she’s crazy and that psychotherapy will help her. Meanwhile, though, they’re sleeping in separate bedrooms (Irina believes that even a kiss will make her turn and maul her husband to death), and after a tense few months of marriage Oliver starts to notice that the cute no-nonsense woman he works with is probaby more his type anyway. But when Irina suspects that her husband might be less than faithful— well, you know what’s bound to happen.
Executed with lots of style, many gorgeous shots, and a keen eye for the innocuously scary detail, this movie does a nice job maintaining tension over time, though there are fewer big-money scares than one might expect or wish for. The look of the film is particularly masterful given its apparently tiny budget— though after its success, Tourneur was out of the low-budget ghetto for good. Moody and almost gothic, Cat People is the sort of stylized horror film that you don’t see done quite this well anymore. Be sure not to blink during Simon’s bewitching penultimate scenes. It’s all almost too gorgeous to be scary at all.
by Megan Weireter | Source: TCM
15 Oct 2007 1:38 PM | Comments (1)
The sequel, ‘Curse of the Cat People’, is also fantastic — very dreamlike, though that might partly be because I watched it at 3am on TCM once. I can’t imagine a current film using the ‘ghost dead mom’ plot without it resulting in schmaltz overload, but it works well in this film.
stephane
10 November 2007
3:13 AM