Cathy's Curse

Cathy's Curse is a bargain basement version of The Omen meets Carrie, which were contemporary horror hits at the time. It's a truly terrible film that has the added disadvantage of seemingly being only available in prints that are in an atrocious state (in the one I saw, the colours were so bad that the blood was purple). But even if this movie was released on high definition it wouldn't change the fact that it's abysmal.

The story is senseless. A mother takes her son George away from the family home, leaving the father and daughter. The dad isn't too pleased about this, so he jumps in his car with his little girl Laura. They swerve off the road to avoid a rabbit and the car blows up. Thirty years later, the son returns to the family home with his wife and daughter, Cathy. Pretty much right away Cathy becomes possessed by George's sister Laura's old doll and becomes homicidal, killing various people. Laura seems to be an embittered soul, angered by her early death and wrecks havoc via her brother's offspring.

From the above synopsis, I think it's only fair to say that the film, strictly speaking should have been called Laura's Curse. But this is only a glaring detail and this film quite frankly doesn't concern itself with such trivialities. There are many moments of WTF in this film. At one point Cathy teleports from the bottom of the stairs to the top and vice-versa, and her mother, witnessing this, just gets annoyed; she doesn't actually seem to be, well, a little surprised that her daughter has developed the ability to teleport at will, she is merely irritated with her misbehaving child. In another scene Cathy sits down for breakfast and throws her plate across the room at the opposite wall, smashing it to bits, and the housekeeper simply picks it up and seems to imply that she just dropped it, rather than launched it 3 metres over the other side of the room. In other words, people in this movie do not act like Earthlings. A further example of utter madness, is where the medium takes hold of an old family picture then starts talking in creepy voices, getting progressively more and more demented until she smashes the picture on the floor while screaming; she then turns around and says that she's really had a marvellous time and would simply love to pop over again. It's just weird. What perhaps makes these people all the stranger is that absolutely no one can act. The performances are universally atrocious. The handyman is abysmal too, although it's maybe not surprising seeing as he appears to be Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac in a rare acting appearance.

There are one or two occasions when Cathy's Curse is almost effective. And it can't be argued that it's pretty bizarre throughout. But despite all this, it drags. The unintentional hilarity is something to behold but you really need some buddies and beer to enjoy this one.

The unholy spawn of The Exorcist, The Omen, and The Bad Seed, Cathy's Curse feels like a made for TV or family approved riff on all those movies without any of the scares. Poor little possessed Cathy won't curse like Regan in The Exorcist, but she will call people "fat cows" with a nice amount of vitriol.

As silly as it is, there is some great low budget 70's ambiance in here that keeps it from being a total misfire and it's not a very long movie, so it won't feel like a complete waste of time.

Even though this film is cheesey and uber-low budget, it's not too bad. Although many of the scenes are more than shades of The Exorcist, Omen, Carrie, and The Fury, there are some unique moments that gave me the shivers (such as the snake-and-rats scene and when Cathy appears and disappears before her mother on the steps). The low-budget, grainy film quality and super cheesey "score" are at the same time distracting and effective, and although the gore quotient is modest, it's gross fun when you get it. The editing and story are a little loose and sloppy at times, but not so much that you want to give up on the film. Sometimes, these weaknesses create an (I'm guessing) unintentional ambiguity that adds to the spooky fun.

In my world, haunted kids and (even more so) freaky-looking dolls are always the makings of a good horror film. This film has both in spades. I found it on Brentwood's "Possesion" 4-movie DVD set, which is a steal at $8. Don't expect winning performances or slick effects, but check it out if you want some good B horror movie fun.

A lot of the IMDb reviews for Cathy's Curse mention the lousy VHS picture quality, but the copy I found online was actually rather good, making me wonder whether the film has since received the remastered treatment for DVD or BluRay. The film itself, however, is still a steaming pile of amateurish garbage, and why anyone felt that it deserved an upgrade is a mystery to me. Still, there are quite a few laughs to be had at the expense of the community theatre cast, the woeful special effects, and the total lack of film-making acumen from director Eddy Matalon.

The film opens with a father arriving home to find that his wife has left him, taking their young son George with her. His daughter Laura has been left behind, so daddy pops her in his car and drives away at speed into the snowy night (where he's going is not explained). When a rabbit runs in front of the car, the man loses control and crashes the vehicle, which goes up in flames killing the occupants.

Scoot forwards a few decades, and George (Alan Scarfe) moves into his old family home with his neurotic wife Vivian (Beverly Murray) and their daughter Cathy (Randi Allen). Exploring the house, Cathy finds a portrait of Laura and the dead girl's old rag doll, after which she begins to act very strangely, playing 'car crashes' with the neighbourhood kids, and attempting to poke out a girl's eye with a nail. She also develops supernatural powers, including telekinesis, teleportation and the ability to make food go rotten in seconds.

A local medium, Agatha (Mary Morter, putting in a truly awful performance), suspects that something is wrong, but Cathy sends her flying out of a first storey window, which causes Vivian to have a breakdown. George leaves Cathy in the care of creepy handyman Paul (Roy Witham), who gets plastered, after which the girl makes him hallucinate (rats, snakes and spiders). When Paul decides to burn Cathy's rag doll, she kills him (but only after he delivers the hilarious line "Go on, you filthy female cow-make us laugh!").

More weird stuff happens, none of which makes any sense. No explanation is given for Cathy's newfound powers, but one assumes that she is possessed by Laura's spirit; why Laura is so malevolent is never made clear. What is abundantly clear is that this lame Exorcist inspired Canadian horror is inept in almost every way imaginable, but for fans of z-grade trash, it'll be just about worth a watch for the unintentional LOLs.

I'm not sure what the goal was with Cathy's Curse. It's a mix up for The Exorcist, The Bad Seed, and about a million other evil kid movies. The wintery atmosphere is a nice touch and, for a bit, one could be fooled into thinking this might end up being some lost 70's classic. Nope.

Cathy's Curse manages to get everything wrong from the hammy acting to the not-so-special effects to Cathy's "curses" that she hurls at people. "Cow" can't quite compare to some of the insults Regan threw at people in The Exorcist.

Don't let me confuse you - Cathy's Curse also has a lot to recommend. It's rarely boring and with such a short run time, I could think of worse ways to kill some time.