Cat People (1982)
Well, what the hell. We're only a mere 6 weeks away from Halloween, so let the Spooky Season begin.....
Here's a film appropriate as any for the kickoff point....writer-director Paul Schrader's update/remake/re-invention of producer Val Lewton's famously creepy 1942 original.
Coming 40 years after the first film, Schrader's version is a far more erotic and exotic take on the basic idea.....with naturally, amped up gruesome special effects and violence that Lewton's films never indulged in, always leaving the worst horrors to the audience's imagination.
But the primary Cat Girl casting is eerily similar in both movies. Lewton found his ethereal feline shapeshifter in diminutive, delicate French actress Simone Simon (also famously featured as the Satan's temptress in 'The Devil and Daniel Webster').
Schrader's choice couldn't possibly be more on the money.....the otherwordly sex bombshell of the 1980's Nastassja Kinski, daughter of the notorious Madman of cinema Klaus Kinski.
With her enormous expressive eyes and compact curvy frame, Kinski virtually radiated the heat of a vaguely foreign, dangerous Manic Pixie Dream Girl. If you could believe any girl could transform herself into a slinking, snarling black panther, it was her.
But first we start off with the origins of cat people, set in a prehistoric, sand swept landscape and set to the moody warblings of David Bowie. It's where some unknown tribe serves up their virgins for some cat canoodlin' with the head panther who lounges about in an artistically constructed twisted branch tree.
Then we move on to modern day New Orleans (another great choice for a setting) where fresh off the boat, sweetly naive Irina (Kinski) arrives to reunite with her long lost brother Paul (Malcolm McDowell, still exuding the sexually charged feral threat he perfected in "A Clockwork Orange")
Yes, they're cat-siblings sure enough and their conversions into dark furry predators wreak some bloody havoc on ordinary mortals......including zookeeper Oliver (John Heard) who's fallen hard for Irina....(in her luscious Kinski-form, that is)
There is one genuinely ghastly death thrown into the mix here, but Paul Schrader devotes much more of his attention to the sensual, carnal aspects of his script and in the seductive expressions and physicality of Kinski, he clearly found his muse. She's way more of a convincing half-human kitty than any of the Catwomen in any of the many Batman films.
(For those who still well remember the '42 'Cat People', the film does pay homage to it, with its own version of that film's unnerving swimming pool scene, only this time with a literally stripped down Annette 'O Toole as the terrified stalkee.....)
Moody, seductive and coated with one of Giorgio Moroder's thrumming electronic scores, 'Cat People' may not quite satisfy today's hardcore horror viewers who demand over-the-top shocks every few minutes. But 44 years later, it still manages to cast its own weird unearthly spell.....
And overall, steamy as hell, we might add. So there's that....
3 stars (***). Not a bad way to jump start a Halloween festival of spookery.
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