Horror Express: The Catman of Paris (Lesley Selander, 1946)

Forming one half of a rare horror double feature knocked out by western and serial specialists Republic Pictures in the mid 1940s, ‘The Catman of Paris’ was presumably born out of an attempt to capitalise on whatever pre-release publicity might have accompanied Universal’s woeful ‘She-Wolf of London’ (released one month later), cross-referenced with the widespread success enjoyed by Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s ‘Cat People’ just a few years earlier, and perhaps also a lingering memory of Guy Endore’s 1933 novel ‘Werewolf of Paris’.

Despite the attention-grabbing title and poster though, to be honest I was resigned to the fact that this would probably be pretty dull fare… so was pleasantly surprised when, for the first reel at least, it turned out to be absolutely bonkers.

For a start, the top hat and opera cape-clad ‘catman’ meows in the voice of a regular house cat, which is delightful, and, in his first (off-screen) appearance, he strikes in the form of a big, expressionist shadow with Nosferatu fingers, gliding across the walls of back lot 1890s Montmartre. Crikey!

The main character / chief catman suspect is a young author, Charles (played by Carl Esmond), who has just caused a sensation by publishing a novel entitled ‘Fraudulent Justice’, in which he recounts in accurate detail the proceedings at a scandalous closed trial, to which only a few select government ministers had been allowed access… yet he claims to know nothing of this, insisting that the whole thing came to him in a dream.

Additionally, he has just returned from ‘the tropics’, where he was struck down by an intense fever which seems to have left him suffering from bouts of amnesia... which of course neatly coincide with the ‘catman’ killings. The first victim of which, we should note, was a Ministry of Justice clerk carrying a confidential dossier containing details of the trial Charles is alleged to have forbidden knowledge of, whilst the second victim ends up being his vindictive ex-fiancée (a great turn by singer and b-movie stalwart Adele Mara).

So, all in all, you can see why the gendarmes (engagingly represented by believer / sceptic duo Gerald Mohr and Fritz Feld) soon want to have a few words with our defensive and bewildered protagonist - although of course they don’t attempt anything so vulgar as to throw him behind bars and see what happens when he next experiences one of his alleged periods of amnesia, because you can’t go around treating a gentleman like that, now can you?

Whenever Charles experiences one of his amnesiac attacks incidentally, we see the same series of images projected over footage of his agonised face, in the same order: some sheaves of wheat blowing in the wind, a fork of lightning striking across what looks like a solarised black sun, the face of a hissing cat, and - entirely inexplicably - a shot of a thing which looks like some kind of space capsule (but couldn't possibly be, in view of the film's production year), floating in a storm-tossed sea with icebergs in the background, spewing oil from its cone/nozzle.

If any living person has an explanation of what in the hell that’s all about, I’d certainly love to hear it.

There’s also a memorably bizarre moment when we see a very striking shot (repeated from the opening credits) of a black cat walking through a highly detailed miniature scale model of one of the street sets, appearing as a giant beast, until the camera pulls back, and Mohr shoos the pesky moggie out of the way, casually announcing, “this is a replica of the murder site I had made over night..”. (WHAT?!)

Similarly perplexing, there’s a great bit later on in which Fritz Feld outlines he wildly holistic rationale for believing a cat-demon is on the loose in Gay Paree, citing a volume of ‘Astrological Prognostications’ apparently compiled by his grandfather, in which “further evidence of planetary influence on transmutation” suggests a regular historical reoccurrence of were-cat phenomena which can be traced back to the reign of Ivan The Terrible. 

The were-cat under investigation in the current case, it seems, is in fact the ninth in the this astrologically defined series, thus making it the final reoccurrence, as per the scientifically recognised nine live of the cat. Any questions?

Meanwhile, pre-empting Glenn Danzig’s Verotika by 70+ years, the film’s entire cast consists of American actors ordered to adopt French accents of highly variable quality and consistency. (Perhaps the worst offender in this regard is leading lady Lenore Aubert, who largely sticks to yankee diction, with the exception of referring to her beloved as “Sharl” at all times.)

That questionable decision aside though, Parisian atmos is ‘The Catman of Paris’ is largely limited to finding space in its lean 62 minute run time for a genuinely entertaining, highly energetic can-can routine, taking place in the Café du Bois, the decadent, fin-de-siecle basement hang-out where Charles and his best pal / literary agent Henry (Douglass Dumbrille) meet to carouse away their evenings in the intoxicating social whirl of whichever sound stage Republic weren’t currently shooting a western on.

Indeed, director Selander had shot well over fifty(!) oaters for Republic by the time he changed tack to handle ‘The Catman..’, and whilst his style remains admirably pacey and fluid throughout, there is definitely still a persistent sense of he and his employers’ more usual day-to-day creeping in around the edges here.

In their commentary track on Imprint’s recent blu-ray release, Kim Newman and Stephen Jones have a whale of a time pointing out costumes which might previously have belonged to ranchers, riverboat gamblers or saloon girls, noting extras who look burlier and more heavily whiskered than habitués of the Parisian underworld really should, and observing that the night club set is clearly a slightly rejigged frontier saloon.

For the most part though, this odd cross-genre bleed actually plays very much in the movie’s favour, as the talky, set-bound boredom which inevitably begins to predominate once the details of the plot get underway is broken up by such unusual (and welcome) additions to the ‘40s b-horror formula as a furniture-smashing, ‘knock down drag out’ bar fight (complete with a leap off the bar from Esmond), and an elaborate, under-cranked stage-coach chase, taking place, one assumes, in some Gallic equivalent of Central Park.

In addition to the errant images and intriguingly odd plot details I outlined above, this all proved enough to keep me thoroughly hooked right up to the film’s finale, when the dreaded ‘catman’ finally makes an appearance, and boy, it’s a memorable one.

A spirited take on a furry-faced, ersatz Mr Hyde, the well-dressed fiend has a lot of fun chasing Lenore Aubert around like a slightly more menacing Benny Hill, until a barrage of police bullets knocks him on his arse, prompting a big reveal / wrap up scene which will remain unspoiled here, aside from noting that its proffered explanation of the event swhich have just transpired frankly makes no sense whatsoever.

So, that’s ‘The Catman of Paris’ folks - W, and indeed TF.

On the basis of this one, you’d better believe I’ll be making time to check out the other Republic horrors post-haste.

Random Paperbacks: Always Say Die by Elizabeth Ferrars (Fontana, 1962)

Given that cover artist John L. Baker appears to have never actually seen a cat (or at least, couldn’t remember what they looked like very well), his decision to illustrate this particular incident from Elizabeth Ferrar’s 1956 mystery novel seems nigh-on inexplicable. But, his decision to go with it nonetheless, reference materials be damned, has helped make this strikingly bizarre effort one of my favourite paperback acquisitions of recent years.

(I also like the fact that that blue-tinted illustration on the back cover has clearly been swiped wholesale from a different book cover, complete with a different artist’s signature still visible on the bottom left.)

For the record, the alleged cat attack occurs on page 32, when a stray moggie leaps onto the shoulders of heroine Helen as she stands around in the grounds of the house belonging to her absent Maiden Aunt’s former home, and it comprises about two paragraphs of what otherwise seems to be a pleasantly atmospheric, old fashioned potboiler, set in the depths of darkest, uh, Berkshire, apparently.

Obligatory ‘Apologies’ Post.

Big Tambo selects his summer reading.

So, I just thought I’d drop a quick line to regular readers to apologise for the complete collapse of my aspirational once-a-week posting regime over the summer.

Rest assured, there has been no particular reason for this. Over the past five years, I’ve managed to keep this blog ticking over nicely in the face of a number of momentous, challenging and potentially disruptive life changes, only to find things stalling over the past few months due to… nothing whatsoever really. I’ve just been a bit, y’know, busy with this and that. Nothing exciting. I haven’t even moved house, as the delightful pic above implies – we just had to move some book shelves for a couple of days to do some work on the windows.

Admittedly, I probably haven’t helped matters by embarking on a number of rambling, time-consuming multi-film reviews (1, 2) whilst neglecting to spend any time sweating over the scanner doing some quick paperback posts to fill up the space in-between. And, when I have done some book posts recently, I’ve found myself actually reading and writing about the damn things (1, 2), which of course just slows things down even further.

Well, so it goes. Just thought I’d reassure you that this blog is still alive and kicking, anyway. My enthusiasm for writing about movies and books remains undiminished, and, despite the increasingly post-apocalyptic state of the weblog landscape, this is the format in which I most enjoy doing it (which is not to say I’d turn my nose up at an offer to, say, do a book or something, BUT HEY). In fact, if the "blogosphere" does go full-on survivalist, I’m good at digging my heels in, so I’m all for it. I’m sure we must have the interweb equivalent of a stream and a potato patch around here somewhere, so praise the lord and pass the ammunition.

On a more immediate level meanwhile, I’m already gearing up for a second year of no nonsense October horror reviews leading up to Halloween, aiming for a post every two days through the month. I had great fun with this last year, so hope I’ll be able to keep up the pace. So, uh, apologies again for the lack of activity here recently, and WATCH THIS SPACE, etc.

Nippon Horrors: Ghost Cat Mansion (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1958)

Before he embarked upon his attempt to make the ‘ultimate horror movie’ in the form of 1960’s startling ‘Jigoku’ (‘Hell’) – a film so ambitious that many claim it played a significant role in bankrupting the financially fragile Shintoho studios – director Nobuo Nakagawa had already made a name for himself as an important contributor to the rather marginal field of Japanese horror cinema, shooting a series of low budget programmers during the years 1957-59 that arguably represent the first conscious attempts to incorporate more modern (eg, Western) horror tropes into the highly formalised tradition of classical Japanese ghost stories.

Nakagawa’s films ran the gamut of popular horror themes, both Japanese (‘Yotsuya Kaidan’, 1959) and foreign (‘Lady Vampire’, also 1959), but today we’re going to be looking at his take on the ubiquitous bakeneko / ghost cat mythos, ‘Bôrei Kaibyô Yashiki’, variously tanslated as ‘Mansion of the Ghost Cat’, ‘Black Cat Mansion’, or my preferred combination of the two options, ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’.

As has previously been discussed on this blog in reference to Yoshihiro Ishikawa’s Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (1960), variations on such stories seem to have exercised a persistent hold over Japanese filmmakers and audiences, with a history of bakeneko titles stretching back to the silent era, and, more pertinently to the film at hand, those who have read that review will also recall that, prior to making his solo debut with ‘..Otama Pond’, Ishikawa had previously worked as Nakagawa’s assistant on most of his pre-‘Jigoku’ horror films.

Whilst the ‘master & protégée’ relationship between the two men must be thus acknowledged, the sad truth is that my prior viewing of ‘..Otama Pond’ lowered my subsequent enjoyment of ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’, simply due to the fact that, for a sensation hungry modern viewer at least, Ishikawa’s film is basically much better – a wilder, stranger, more ambitious and visually splendid take on the ghost-cat formula than that achieved by his sensei a few years earlier, even as it covers about 75% of the same ground, stylistically speaking.

This is not to imply that ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’ is anything less than a perfect satisfactory (and indeed somewhat innovative) example of bakeneko cinema of course. In fact, its deficiencies in comparison to the later film likely stem mainly from its more obvious origins as a rushed, cash-strapped b-movie, rather than from any lack of ambition on the part of its makers, and as such, it’s probably best if I nix the unfair comparison between the two films for now and allow ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’ stand on its own not-inconsiderable merits.

It certainly gets off to wonderfully atmospheric start, that’s for sure. Subjective POV torch beams prowl the darkened corridors of a deserted Tokyo hospital, taking us eventually to the skeleton and specimen jar filled lab of a doctor who is apparently pulling an all-nighter. Who could that be on the stairs, he wonders, as the heavy footfalls of whoever we were following with the torch creak the floorboards outside. This, the doctor muses to himself, reminds him of certain events that transpired six years ago, and, like some doomed noir protagonist awaiting a terrible fate, he calmly sits down and lights a cigarette, awaiting the arrival of his sinister visitor.

Cue flashback to six years earlier. The doc’s wife is suffering from TB, and, to aid her recovery, the couple have left Tokyo and moved back to her familial home on the Southern island of Kyushu. For reasons that never really become clear, the doctor’s brother-in-law has secured them lodgings in, uh - a shunned, clifftop haunted house in which no one has lived for over a century. (That his brother-in-law might be somewhat of a jerk is a possibility the doctor may wish to consider, but it is not something the filmmakers choose to dwell upon here.)

As you might well have expected, upon moving into their new home, the couple and their household almost immediately experience all manner of spooky goings-on, and in particular, they become subject to frequent visitations from a particularly persistent and terrible variation on the inevitable kaidan white-haired-old-lady ghost. Not even so much a ghost in this case in fact, but a full-blown monster of apparently palpable form, this bastard hag proceeds in short order to kill the family dog and terrify the nurse who is helping the doctor establish a new clinic, before repeatedly utilising prank phone calls and disguised voices to gain entry to the house, on each occasion making a bee-line straight for the long-suffering wife, whom she proceeds to strangle to the point of near-death, only to disappear when interrupted at the last moment.

Understandably unnerved by all this grim incident, the doctor temporarily puts his rationalist principles on hold and pays a visit to a venerable local Buddhist priest, who promptly makes with the old “ah yes, I remember the dark legends connected to that dreadful old house..” routine, prompting (as per the formula of every other bakeneko movie I’ve seen to date) another flashback within the flashback, this time taking us back to (I assume) the Edo Period – a change accompanied by a corresponding shift to colour photography.

Up to this point, it must be said that ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’ has been directed with great skill. The opening creep though the hospital and the couple’s initial investigation of the haunted house both utilise the inherently terrifying combination of smooth, slow camera movements and wide, empty spaces that would later be perfected by Masaki Kobayashi in his epic ‘Kwaidan’ (1964), and even minor incidents such as a moment when the couple’s car is run off the road by a stray cat are conveyed using jarring, Hitchcock-esque mini-montages that further add to the somewhat ‘Carnival of Souls’-esque sense of icy, detached unease.If, as I’ve always thought, the key to creating a genuinely scary story is to present a world that seems sinister and somehow off-balance even before anything spooky happens, then it’s safe to say that Nakagawa succeeds here with aplomb.

It is a shame then that once the action shifts to the past and the photography switches to a rather drab variety of colour, this carefully wrought atmosphere largely vanishes. Suddenly, Nakagawa’s direction becomes blandly formal, whilst the obviously set-bound backdrops take on an unnatural, theatrical feel and the acting becomes stiff and melodramatic. As with many older Japanese period dramas, it sometimes feels more as if we're watching a local theatre reenactment of a well-known legend than an engaging piece of cinema.

Anyway, the flashback story here chiefly concerns the abuses of power perpetrated by one Lord Shogen, a wealthy local daimyo (and patriarch of the future haunted mansion of course), who is, to put it mildly, a bit of an arsehole.

When we first meet Shogen, he is on the verge of slaughtering his most trusted servant for some minor infringement of protocol (the servant’s life is only spared after Shogen’s upstanding son intervenes), and the Lord’s inordinately aggressive and cowardly behaviour only gets worse from thereon in.

In brief then, dark powers of a vengeful and supernatural nature are eventually evoked to deal with this disagreeable fellow following an incident in which he summons a young samurai and renowned Go master to his chambers to tutor him in the finer points of the game. Unfortunately however, the young man makes the fatal error of playing Shogen in a fair contest, refusing to let the diamyo cheat and replay his moves, with the inevitable result that lord grumpy-pants becomes so irate that he eventually snaps and, grabbing his katana, redecorates his dayroom with the samurai’s blood.

When Shogen subsequently has the audacity to avoid responsibility for the killing by claiming that the young man instantly left for Kyoto to further study Go technique after becoming embarrassed when the Lord defeated him in the game, the samurai’s blind mother – for whom he cared and provided sole financial support – cannily disbelieves him, and, visiting the daimyo to try to discover what actually happened to her son, her suspicions turn to futile rage after the hateful old bastard adds insult to injury by taking the opportunity to rape her.

As she contemplates her sorry state, the blind woman is visited by a ghostly vision of her son, who confirms the truth of her suspicions about what happened to him, and, seeing no way forward, she clutches her beloved pet cat to her bosom and uses a dagger to take her own life, calling on the spirit of her cat to execute her vengeance from beyond the grave. Before her blood has even dried of course, it’s ghost-cat-a-go-go for the folks in the mansion on the hill.

One thing I like about the avenging spirits in these bakeneko stories (and indeed in Asian ghost stories more generally) is how absolutely ruthless they are, in comparison to their more genteel, ‘poetic justice’-inclined Western counterparts. In this case for instance, all of the evil in the story has emanated directly from Lord Shogen himself. His mother, son and servants are all portrayed as sympathetic characters, as much the victims of his cruelty as anyone else - but just try telling the ghost-cat that! The dying woman specifically issued her curse against the bad man plus his entire family, his household and his descendants, and ghost-cat’s not taking any prisoners.

Indeed, the first thing the avenging ghost does is possess the body of the daimyo’s elderly mother, transforming her not only into the image of the wild, white-haired hag seen in the film’s present day section, but into an actual anthropomorphic cat-monster! Regrettably for anyone still taking ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’ seriously by this point, the result of this transformation is frankly hilarious, prompting a ten minute segment in which the film goes absolutely berserk.

“My mother took a carp from the pond and went under the house?!” exclaims the daimyo at one point when a servant relates details of his mother’s disturbing cat-like behaviour, and by the time the cat-mother – her costume complete with pointy, fluffy ears that spring upward when she raises her head – begins busting out the familiar J-horror lady-ghost device of using an invisible fishing rod to draw her victims toward her like a sci-fi tractor beam, even the most determinedly straight-faced viewers will be hard-pressed to suppress a few WTF-ish guffaws.

As the ghost-cat’s rampage reaches its bloody conclusion, Nakagawa utilises prototypes of many of the quasi-psychedelic visual effects later employed by Ishikawa In ‘..Otama Pond’, with everything from double-exposures and giant, looming cat shadows to random, Bava-esque coloured gel lighting wantonly thrown around, to pleasantly psychedelic effect. Though such effects are neither as extensively nor effectively used as in the later film (here for instance, the coloured lighting simply consists of spinning, multi-hued spot-lights that come out of nowhere to assault the tormented Lord Shogen), this is all still jolly good fun, needless to say.

Thankfully, this excessive and unhinged atmosphere is to a certain extent maintained when we return to the black & white ‘present day’, wherein a charm proffered by the priest and the disinterment of the mouldering skeleton of the Go master (who had been bricked up Poe-style within the walls of the house) helps the doctor and his wife return their angry revenant to its resting place, in a wind-swept, lightning-riddled finale that remains very enjoyable – at least until a thoroughly disappointing bummer of a contrived happy ending follows

Flawed though it may be, I don’t believe that ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’s deficiencies are *quite* serious enough to ruin the good feeling generated by its highlights. Although budgetary contraints and tonal inconsistencies mean that no one’s ever likely to single it out as a masterpiece, it is nonetheless a wild and wooly bit of quintessential Japanese b-horror, rich in authentically creepy moments and full-on weirdness that fans of the particular ‘feel’ generated by this kind of thing are liable to cherish.

The Pan Book of Horror Stories edited by Herbert Van Thal (1959 / 12th printing, 1965)

  

So, check out what I recently found skulking on the goodwill shelf in a café in Laugharne, South-West Wales. A £2 donation to the local cat welfare charity (appropriately enough), and it was mine.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time lurking in British second hand bookshops or libraries will no doubt be familiar with Pan’s seemingly never-ending series of horror story collections, and to be honest I’ve rarely paid them much attention, but I couldn’t resist the fantastic design and artwork of this first volume (uncredited, of course)... and the vague knowledge that some of these are quite collectible didn’t hurt either.

Pretty interesting line-up too, with the authors presented, strangely yet pleasingly, in alphabetical order. An early Nigel Kneale story, more slumming literary colossi than I can bother listing, and, most interestingly from my POV, ‘The Horror in the Museum’ - a story now widely recognised as being more or less entirely the work of H.P. Lovecraft, but presented here under the name of its original credited author, Hazel Heald, and presumably licensed directly from publishers of ‘Weird Tales’ without the involvement of Lovecraft’s executors.

(Well, it’s interesting to me, at least.)

Nippon Horrors: Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (Yoshihiro Ishikawa, 1960)

Thus far in this ‘Nippon Horrors’ strand, we’ve been looking at movies that are either modern style, Western-influenced horror films, or else just lunatic one-offs of one kind or another, but it is of course impossible to gain an understanding of Japanese horror without examining the more traditional k(w)aidan tales that comprised by far the most prolific category within the genre prior to 1970. And if we’re talking kaidan, then before long, we’ll be talking kaibyo, aka bakeneko, aka GHOST-CATS - a subject that the movie-going public in Japan apparently couldn’t get enough of, with a catalogue of titles stretching right back to the dawn of cinema.

If I started trying to run down the folkloric roots of these ‘ghost-cat’ stories, we’d be here all day, but needless to say, specific ghost-cat legends pertaining to such locales as Okazaki, Arima and (most pertinently in this case, perhaps) Kasane Swamp go back at least a few hundred years, and formed a cornerstone of the canon of supernatural kabuki plays, woodcuts and novels that fed straight into the earliest Japanese fantastic films.

Although most of Japan’s silent-era films are now lost, surviving records indicate that the Okazaki ghost-cat legend alone was filmed three times prior to 1917, once by the esteemed “father of Japanese cinema” Shozo Makino no less, whilst the first example of the ‘cursed wall’ variant, which appears to incorporate elements taken from Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ into the mix, appeared as early as 1918.

I have heard Kiyohiko Ushihara’s 1938 production ‘Ghost Cat: Haunted Shamisen’ referred to as the earliest surviving Japanese film to include fantastical elements, and, after the war, the 1950s seem to have heralded an unprecedented boom in ghost-cat pictures, with a few representative examples including ‘Ghost Cat: Cursed Wall’ (Kenji Misumi, 1958), ‘Cat Monster of Ouma Cross’ (Bin Kato, 1954) and ‘Ghost Cat of Yonaki Swamp’ (Katsukiko Tazaka, 1957), as picked from a list comprising many, many more titles.

Given all this, it is slightly ironic that by far the best-known ghost-cat movie in the West is Kaneto Shindô’s arthouse-horror classic ‘Kuroneko’ (‘Black Cat’, 1968), a film that domestic audiences must have seen as a nostalgic summation of a set of clichés endlessly reiterated over the course of the preceding fifty years, rather than the wild novelty it may have appeared to foreign viewers.

So, the Japanese like their ghost-cats – this much we know. Insofar as I can tell from online reading, the plots of these movies seem standardised to the point of complete uniformity, but I probably shouldn’t draw too many generalisations until I’ve at least seen a few more of them. So as such, let’s jump in entirely at random with ‘Ghost Cat of Otama Pond’, selected for no other reason than that I happen to have a copy, and watched it last week.

A relatively late entry in the ghost-cat cycle, this 1960 Shintoho production was the directorial debut of one Yoshihiro Ishikawa, striking out on his own for the first time after a lengthy spell working as assistant and co-writer to horror specialist Nobuo Nakagawa, on such films as ‘Black Cat Mansion’ (1958), ‘The Woman Vampire’ (1959) and ‘The Ghost of Yotsuya’ (1959) (hopefully we’ll get around to those here at some point). Like Nakagawa’s films, ‘..Otama Pond’ seems notable for combining a traditional kaidan storyline with techniques borrowed from contemporary Western horror films, and, unusually for a 1960 genre picture from the cash-strapped Shintoho, it makes great use of colour photography too.*

Things begin in the present day, where we join a neatly-attired couple in western dress who are in the process of getting lost amid a network of narrow, woodland paths in an area we later learn is “known for its thick fog”. They are en route to the man’s parental home, to seek his father’s blessing prior to their marriage, but unknown forces seem to be endlessly drawing them back to the same swampy-looking pond. “If we arrive after dark, my father won’t let us marry”, the man says. A curious notion, but, well.. let’s move on.

Right from the outset here, the atmosphere is incredibly spooky, with massively ominous, droning music (composed by Chumei Watanabe) and authentically muddy-looking, claustrophobic sets used to represent the woodland locale. It is difficult to pin-point quite how the film succeeds so well in creating a genuinely unnerving effect from such stock elements, but nonetheless, it does. Even the thunder-claps seem scary, and when was the last time you felt that whilst watching a horror film?

Of course, frequent cutaway shots to a mewling black cat lurking in the trees help, and when the couple eventually take shelter in a derelict house, despairing of finding their way out of this nightmare before morning, the woman drifts off into a tormented fever after encountering a terrifying vision of a white-haired witch archetype who will need no introduction to those familiar with Kurosawa’s heavily kaidan-inspired ‘Throne of Blood’. (The shot in which the witch appears to ‘reel in’ her fainting victim in slow motion is wonderfully sinister.)

Extensive use is made here of anti-naturalistic, Bava-esque gel lighting, with inexplicable green and red glows lurking around every corner, and indeed, just like the protagonists of a Western gothic horror film, this couple – their clothes and behavior coding them as ‘modern’ and ‘rational’ – seem to have found themselves trapped in a world that is entirely ruled by the more macabre elements of antiquity. (Even the doctor they track down the next morning immediately starts rabbiting on about ancient curses, and chooses to treat the lady’s fever by means of an elaborate Buddhist exorcism.)

Also recalling a Western gothic, it is our characters’ previously obscure family history that eventually proves responsible for subjecting them to such a weird fate… as gradually becomes clear when the doctor begins narrating the story which, via flashback, will comprise the majority of the movie’s remaining run-time.

Back to the days of the Shogunate then, where we find a pretty standard star-crossed lovers vengeance story unfolding, played out in a rigidly formal yet beguilingly beautiful manner. The lovers’ final meeting is a particular highlight in this regard, taking place against a nigh-on apocalyptic sunset in a desolate wasteland, creating a suitably expressionistic backdrop to their doomed farewell.

Interestingly, the in-fighting between the lovers’ rival clans here adds a slight twist of populist politics to the mix – something that seems to be a reoccurring theme within ‘ghost-cat’ stories. Viewers of ‘Kuroneko’ will recall that that film incorporates a pretty strident critique of those who propagate conflict to line their own pockets, and here, the catalyst for the destruction of the benevolent family comes when their patriarch publically speaks out against unfair taxes leveled by the corrupt local magistrate - thus prompting said magistrate and his evil brood of cronies to do away with him and his family in as disproportionately violent and generally dastardly a fashion as can be imagined.

As soon as the good family’s martially gifted son (the male portion of the star-crossed lovers) departs to pursue a career in Edo, the vultures descend, and, as is standard procedure in these supernatural vengeance stories, the family home is set ablaze and the patriarch and elderly grandmother cruelly murdered, whilst the noble daughter/sister chooses to kill herself with a hairpin (that ever-useful accessory of the virtuous Japanese maiden) when kidnapped and threatened with rape by the intruders.**

All of this is already somewhat grimmer business than you’d be liable to see in a Western film from 1960 not entitled ‘Black Sunday’, and, when the noble son returns home to learn of the destruction of his family, he meets his downfall by way of an unusually intense and sinister sword-fighting set-piece, full of bloody wounds, bulging eyes and jagged, kabuki-like choreography.

With ominous, post-massacre shots of blood red skies (echoing both the house-fire and the blood spreading across the waters of the pond where the bodies are dumped), and unspeakably eerie, metal-scraping fiddle music, the combined consequences of all of this villainy amount to strong stuff indeed, designed to have us almost crying out for the ghostly retribution we know is on its way.

And thankfully, it’s not wasting any time getting here, either. Following their crimes, the clan of baddies is almost immediately subjected to such a tirade of hair-raising supernatural phenomena, it’s a wonder they don't immediately go insane and flee straight for the nearest fortified town. Nocturnal visits from reanimated corpses, bleeding walls, ghostly tolling bells, sake turning to blood, giant cat silhouettes and unearthly red glows projected against screen-doors, sleep-walking possessed daughters, gory-lock shaking Macbeth-like phantoms, and even a floating yokai fireball pitching in for the conclusion.

Of course, we all know from the outset that it’s curtains for the villains, but the filmmakers have a heck of a lot of fun getting us to that point, realizing all of the above with a great deal of ghoulish skill and visual imagination, and even managing to generate some surface level tension, despite the fateful inevitability of the scenario now in play.

As seen in ‘Kuroneko’, but perhaps not in earlier versions of this story (or so I would imagine), the vengeful ghost-cat actually takes on solid, humanoid form here too, appearing as a werewolf-clawed half-woman, half-cat monster who turns up in one memorable scene to chomp the head off a passing snake and generally put the wind up the surviving characters even further. Curiously though, this furry cat-monster appears only briefly, and fails to return for the film’s finale, so I can only assume that the filmmakers must have decided that the costume just looked too silly, and minimized its use. It IS pretty silly, to be fair, but speaking as a lifelong fan of outlandish horror movie nonsense, I was still disappointed that we were denied any scenes of full-on, Paul Naschy-esque werecat mayhem. Oh well, you can’t have everything I suppose.

Lacking though at may be in furry-clawed grappling however, the conclusion here is certainly anything but underwhelming – in fact it is an desperate maelstrom of blood-letting, cat-hissing, limb-hacking carnage, incorporating strobe speed cutting, all kinds of goofy spook manifestations and howling super-imposed cat-faces. Whilst it may be far more orderly than the equivalent scenes of madness in Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s legendary ‘Hausu’ (1977), we’re definitely somewhere in the same ballpark here, tonally speaking.

I many ways, ‘Ghost Cat of Otama Pond’ seems poised at a transitional moment in the development of Japanese horror. From 1960 onwards, the popularity of kaidan films seemed seems to have plummeted (at least if we can judge from the quantity of films produced in the genre), with only Shindô’s more prestige productions really flying the flag for the form by the second half of the decade, leaving Japanese horror flailing around in a bit of a no man’s land, mainly resulting in the kind of occasional one-offs and stylistic cross-overs that we’ve looked at previously in this review strand.

As such, a film like ‘..Otama Pond’ can perhaps best be viewed as an attempt to keep the kaidan train rolling by adopting something of an east-meets-west approach, grafting Western techniques and aesthetics (lightning flashes, gel lighting, hairy monsters) onto a highly traditional, folkloric narrative. The extravagant use of colour is interesting in this regard, with the concentration on deep reds and luminous greens causing ‘..Otama Pond’ to completely lose the trademark ‘bone-chilling cold’ evoked by many older kaidan films, instead moving toward a kind of sweaty, hot-house fecundity that prefigures the kind of colour horror films that would begin to emerge from Italy just a few years later.

Given its era, I was also surprised how thickly the film lays on the horror business. At a time when many Asian (and indeed European) ghost stories were more inclined to go for the ‘softly, softly’ approach, padding out a few minutes-worth of spooky goings on with acres of convoluted plotting and dialogue, Ishikawa really goes all out for scares, throwing everything at his disposal into trying to freak his audience out, and dedicating probably about two thirds of the eventual run time to supernatural creepery of one kind of another. (Needless to say, I approve.)

The stiff presentation of the story here may feel more like a formalised re-enactment of an ancient legend than an engaging piece of human drama, but nonetheless, the extraordinary variety of macabre visuals and the general sense of marauding, out of control terror help make ‘Ghost Cat of Otama Pond’ a hugely rewarding experience for fans of early ‘60s horror, presenting a cocktail of thrills, weird imagery and atmosphere that matches up to the very best of the Italian gothics. By which I mean, I really liked it. A definite two paws up in the cat-related horror movie sweepstakes.

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* Less than a year after this film was released, Shintoho – a studio initially founded by renegade Toho staff following an industrial dispute, and renowned for the creative freedom it allowed its filmmakers – declared bankruptcy and promptly ceased to exist, the earliest casualty of the slow decline of the Japanese studio system through the ‘60s and ‘70s. Notably, the commercial failure of Nakagawa’s ambitious horror epic ‘Jigoku: The Sinners of Hell’ (1960) is often seen as a key factor in the studio’s demise.

** Whilst it is of no importance to the film’s narrative, those of you who, like me, enjoy shouting “NINJA!” at your TV sets at every opportunity may wish to note that the baddies initially creep up on the good family dressed in traditional ninja outfits. So there ya go. NINJA!

Deathblog: Mike Vraney (1957-2014) & Top Five Something Weird Releases.

I’m afraid I’m a bit late on this one, but it wasn’t until earlier this week that I learned – via a tribute post on Tim Lucas’s blog – that Mike Vraney, founder of the legendary Something Weird Video label, passed away at the start of January.

Conditions in whatever passes for the “industry” of restoring and repackaging old films may have moved on considerably since SWV’s glory days in the ‘90s, but the sheer volume of lunatic oddities and forgotten, marginal footage that they unleashed upon the world means that most of us are still playing catch-up, and it’s safe to say that most people who have been fans of weird movies for any length of time can probably recite their famous opening reel from memory. Their releases were certainly pivotal in inspiring me to begin taking an active interest in this kinda thing, and that crazy echo effect that plays beneath their logo still gives me a brilliant “I-have-no-idea-what’s-gonna-happen-next”, thrill of the unknown type tingle every time I hear it.

Of course, what ‘happened next’ wasn’t always all that great – try as I might, I’m really just not in the market for most of the seemingly endless ‘60s sexploitation flicks that they put so much effort into releasing, and, hilarious though most of his movies may be on first viewing, I’m not really that big a fan of their flagship director Herschell Gordon Lewis. But nonetheless, I’m glad that all that kinda stuff exists, and that there was someone dedicated enough to put it all out there – and, as Lucas’s obit makes abundantly clear, when it comes to the legacy of SWV, exists is very much the key word.

In the past few decades, we’ve got used to a world in which the chances of any currently existing piece of art or culture being lost forever is fairly minimal (or so we assume, anyway). But that certainly wasn’t the case back when Vraney was making the scene, and I think it’s fair to say that the impact he personally had on the preservation of pre-video tape era American film was vast.

All of those stranger, trashier, seedier flicks form the ‘50s, ‘60s & ‘70s that so many of us are currently so busy downloading, streaming, watching on Youtube..? A fair percentage of them wouldn’t just have been ‘hard to find’ without the efforts of Vraney and SWV, they would have been destroyed. The kind of material he specialised in fell well below the radar of any ‘official’ archive or film library, and if it wasn’t for his timely intervention, how many movies which are now marvelled over by viewers around the world (to say nothing of their value as a historical record of American life & culture in the mid-20th century) would have ended up in the incinerator? I don’t know much about Vraney as a person, but for that alone I think, he deserves our eternal respect.

As such, a good way to pay tribute seems to be to run through a quick list of some of my all-time favourite SWV releases, most of which would probably never have even reached our eyes without the efforts of Mike Vraney and his collaborators.

5. The Black Cat (1964)

Not to be confused with any of the numerous, more storied horror films inspired by Poe’s most-filmed tale, this out-of-nowhere regional obscurity – strangely accomplished on a technical level, yet utterly batshit in terms of acting & scripting – uses its literary source material as the jumping off point for the story of a strange, cackling man-child who, in between a lot of rather boring talky segments, commands our continued attention by means of force-feeding champagne to his frightened menagerie of animal friends, silently freaking out in an outburst of murderous rage in a ‘Moe’s Tavern’-esque dive-bar as an unknown, eye-patch wearing garage band plays, and finally lamping his long-suffering wife in the face with a fire-axe, in a full-on gore moment that could have escaped from an ‘80s Fulci movie. What does it all mean..? The immediate death of somebody’s dreams of being a great film director, more than likely, but I for one certainly enjoyed the resulting mess.

4. Blood Freak (1971)

My god, what can you possibly say about this one that hasn’t been said already? Truly one of most confounding brain-wrongs ever coughed up from the depths of marginal American film-making, it is staggeringly inept, utterly bizarre and genuinely rather unsettling in its presentation of a world in which everyone seems to be a severely traumatised and/or maladjusted individual under the influence of heavy sedatives, torn between the influence of evangelical Christianity, systematic drug abuse and chemically-enhanced factory farming. It’s like a Butthole Surfers album come to life in the form of a pro-God, anti-drug, Vietnam-damaged turkey-headed psychedelic gore movie, with the fact that it’s confused message seems to be entirely in earnest only rendering it all the more upsetting. Or at least, I think it is, anyway. To be honest, I’m still not sure whether the stern narrator who turns up at the end to warn us about the dangers of drug addiction whilst smoking cigarettes and coughing like a cancer patient is meant as a piece of intentional humour, or just the result of random, unthinking incompetence. In fact, I don’t know if anyone really knows. Most of the other people on screen act like they barely even know how to breathe or stand upright, so they’re not really giving us any clues. In the final analysis: I don’t know where this came from, or what it’s trying to say, but God help us all. UNcinema at its finest, and most terrifying.

3. The Fat Black Pussycat (1963)

Featured on the same disc as the aforementioned ‘Black Cat’ (hence no cover art), it’s been a long time since I watched this one so my memory ain’t all that clear, but my overall impression was that of it being an absolute belter of a weird little movie. As I recall, the story goes that it started life as a sorta New York shot murder mystery in which two square cops go under cover amid Greenwich Village beatniks, prompting much wonderful early Roger Corman / Jack Hill type comedic shenanigans as they search for a giallo-esque killer amid the wastrels and hep-cats of the coffee bar / house party scene. Then apparently, after all this was done and dusted, a new producer (the aptly named M.A. Ripps) got hold of the initial cut, decided it was too dull to release as was, and set out again to shoot a bunch of new foot age and a new ending, splicing additional moments of sex, violence and bomb blasts into existing scenes, and adding a horror-ish plotline about an evil cat taking over people’s minds and driving them to murder! The result? Disorientating moments of spatial and temporal incoherence, jarring and unpredictable shifts in tone, meaningful plot-lines that gradually veer off into drooling insanity, and (as I recall) more fun than those squares who insist upon watching movies that were all shot at the same time by the same people can even imagine.

2. Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973) / Roseland (1971)

You want “something weird”? You got it. And praise be to SWV for helping to disinter two thirds of the extant celluloid legacy of perhaps the greatest unsung hero of American outsider cinema, the one and only Fredric Hobbs. I already spilled much ink on the subject of ‘Godmonster..’ here, so instead we’ll say a few words about ‘Roseland’, which I was meaning to embark on a similarly detailed write-up of, but… just couldn’t face it, to be honest. Shot for producer Harry Novak on the basis of “nudity + whatever = bucks”, ‘Roseland’ is ostensibly Hobbs’ “sexploitation” film, in much the same way that Alabama’s Ghost is his “blaxploitation” film and ‘Godmonster..’ is his “monster movie”. Which is to say: certain images and ideas may momentarily cross over with the conventions of the genre in question, but basically 98% of the completed footage resembles nothing that has previously been seen in any motion picture made anywhere on earth.

Featuring Hobbs regulars E. Kerrigan Prescott and Christopher Brooks delivering their most fevered and theatrical performances to date (the latter in the role of a black Hieronymous Bosch), ‘Roseland’ to some extent concerns with the following: 1) Prescott’s career-ruining performance on the Ed Sullivan show of a big band show tune entitled ‘You Can’t Fart Around With Love’, an event that apparently traumatises the nation. 2) His subsequent mental illness, which sees him assuming the guise of ‘the black bandit’ and stealing prints of pornographic films from what appears to be a giant, echoing gymnasium. 3) The revelations imparted to him by the re-embodied spirit of Hieronymous Bosch, and his ongoing ideological conflict with a sleazy psychiatrist regarding issues of sexual morality that become increasingly unclear as the film progresses. And, 4), extremely lengthy messianic fantasy sequences in which armies of naked hippies trudge across expanses of unoccupied hillside to prostrate themselves in worship before a series of giant phallic statues. In conclusion, I would not recommend this film for viewing by the uninitiated, for that way lies only pain, but for those of us already driven to a state of fanaticism by Hobbs’ two later works, it represents another essential corner of the Bermuda triangle that is his brief but unique filmography.

1. Confessions of a Psycho-Cat (196?)

Yeah, so apparently I just really like cheap, black & white films of uncertain pedigree with vague counter-cultural affiliations and the word ‘cat’ in the title. Deal with it. Anyway, I’ll immediately cop that ‘Confessions of a Psycho-Cat’ isn’t really ostensibly ‘better’ (or weirder, or more entertaining) than any of the other films on this list, but for me, it still stands tall as the perfect example of an SWV release: a vicious, sleaze-packed and total impoverished exploitation picture, seemingly thrown together by a gang of sneering, Nouvelle Vague-digging beatniks, none of whom ever troubled the film industry again, and incorporating footage culled from at least two completely different projects, seemingly shot about five years apart. Pure magic. This was actually one of the first films I reviewed for this weblog, and, whilst I can’t really endorse either the tone or content of my writing back then (never mind the stolen screen-grabs, before I figured out how to do them myself), my enthusiasm for the film itself remains untarnished. In short, an unlikely ‘Most Dangerous Game’ framing story sets the scene for a deranged female huntress stalking the streets of New York in search of three nefarious losers who accepted her “stay alive for 24 hours” wager. Much semi-experimental, hand-held camera based mayhem ensues, incorporating twitchy, Hawaiian shirt-clad drug pushers, Jake LaMotta staggering about like a drunken human cannonball, wild modern jazz freakouts, bloody misogynistic murder flashbacks and a bow & arrow battle in Central Park. Whoa there. Just in case we get TOO excited, there are a lot of languorous, fully-clothed hippie ‘love’ scenes spliced in from the later, post-’67 shooting date too, but hey, it’s Something Weird, so you wouldn’t expect anything less really, would you? Go with it.

Something Weird Video still exists, and you can buy stuff from them here.

Penguin Time.

Taking a tip from Caustic Cover Critic, what better way to get in gear for the new year than with a gallery of some recent acquisitions from the best-dressed paperback imprint in town?

(1967, cover design by Alan Aldbridge, incorporating a detail from the ‘The Garden of Delights’ by Hieronymous Bosch)


(1964, cover by Alan Aldbridge)


(1966, cover by Brian Haynes)


(1962, cover uncredited)


(1957, cover uncredited)


(1952, cover by Charles Raymond, additional black marker by hands unknown)

Cassandra Cat / Az Prijde Kocour(Vojtech Jasný, 1963)

A pioneering Czech family/fantasy film that I’m sure is fondly remembered by many people of a certain age in that part of the world, 1963’s “Cassandra Cat”, aka “When the Cat Comes”, confronts the modern viewer with a basic question:

How much whimsical small town life are you prepared to sit through, in order to see a cat wearing new wave sunglasses?

Assuming your answer is “a fair amount, I suppose”, read on!

The film opens with a jovial old geezer who lives in the clock tower in the middle of a small market town. Using a makeshift spy-glass, he observes his neighbours, passing oblique comment on their endearingly eccentric ways. You know the drill: ho ho ho, it’s ten o’clock, and here comes so and so as usual, arsing about in a broadly comedic manner as befits his or her single personality trait, etc etc.


In fairness to Vojtech Jasný and his collaborators, I suppose this stuff wasn’t quite so much of a face-punchingly played out cliché back in 1963, but still, the need certain filmmakers seem to feel to present their fellow countrymen as a bunch of lovable, simple-minded goofballs never really sits well with me.

In particular, we are introduced here to marginally bohemian school teacher Robert, who wears a baggy beatnik sweater and tries to encourage ‘imagination’ and ‘fantasy’ in his young charges (whatta nice guy!). Robert’s opposite number is the smarmy headmaster, who hates fun and enjoys science and taxidermy. We see him shoot a stork out of the sky as a crowd of gawping townsfolk look on (whatta prick!).


The headmaster’s ever-present henchman is the school janitor, who I mention simply to point out the fact that he’s played by the same guy who played the school janitor/friendly vampire guy in Václav Vorlíček’s “Saxana”, nearly ten years later. Looking at actor Vladimír Mensík’s CV on IMDB, he seems to have appeared in just about every Czech film ever made, and has at least a few more janitors, handymen and caretakers to his credit. Talk about typecasting!

When the headmaster has completed his stuffed stork, there is a scene in which the janitor picks up the bird and runs round and round the room at high speed with the camera following him, seemingly in an attempt to make the audience dizzy. So that was kinda cool.


A lot of rather vague faffing around follows, during which I began to seriously question the processes by which I ended up owning a copy of this movie and watching it. Things do eventually look up though, beginning with a scene in which Teacher Robert invites the old clocktower geezer into his classroom to model for the children (I’m all for crazy, creative teaching methods but I’m not sure I can really see the logic of the ‘drawing an old man’ lesson-plan). Asked by the children to regale them with a story from his sea-faring days, the geezer launches into a fine example of the kind of dazzlingly aimless, surrealistic old man story that really does brighten my day.

He tells of how he was once shipwrecked on a foreign shore, where for the lack of anything better to do he wandered into a performance by a travelling theatre show, and fell hopelessly in love with a dancer named Diana, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. So infatuated was he that he proceeded to tag along with the show, helping them out and trying to ingratiate himself with the fair lady. Diana though preferred to lavish her attentions on her pet cat, who wore his own pair of special cat eye-glasses. The travelling show’s primary rule was that the cat’s eye-glasses should never, ever be removed. But, piqued by jealousy and curiosity, our hapless sailor naturally did just that one day, and suddenly, everybody caught in the cat’s gaze changed colour in a way that revealed their true nature – so ‘unfaithful people’ turned yellow, ‘liars’ turned purple, people in love turned red and so on - causing considerable hullabaloo that saw the cat killed by vengeful citizens and sailor-man expelled from the travelling show, after which he never saw Diana again!



Inspired by this curious tale, the under-stimulated Eastern Bloc youth begin drawing pictures of beautiful ladies and visually-impaired cats, and clap along as the old man dances a merry jig and sings a song for them, much to the chagrin of the crusty old headmaster, who is spying through the keyhole.

Just then, right on cue, a brightly coloured wagon pulls into town, carrying a trad jazz band clad in head-to-foot black bodysuits, a top-hatted magician (played by the same actor as the old man, for reasons that are never entirely made clear – I suppose the implication is that the travelling show has been ‘summoned’ into reality by the children’s imaginations?), and – YES! – this is the reason I’m watching this damn movie! The beautiful Diana and her prophetically attired pussycat!



Indeed, that is literally the case. Whilst browsing the selections at first class rare-movies emporium All Clues No Solutions recently, I happened across some pictures of this trend-setting moggie, saw that they emanated from another one of those reliably stupendous Czech fantasy movies, and thought, well, why the hell not, y’know? This one’s bound to be worth a look.

And sure enough, the arrival of the cat and his crew heralds “Cassandra Cat”s undeniable highlight – the extraordinary set-piece sequence in which the townsfolk fill the town hall to watch the magical travelling show.

The show begins as Mr. Top Hat presents a black-lit puppet show in which animated objects and empty suits of clothes enact strange and beguiling scenarios. The crowd are initially delighted, but then rather perturbed when it becomes clear that the objects on stage represent some of the town’s more prominent citizens, and that the story being enacted sheds light on their shameful secrets and general foolishness. After a few moments of stunned silence, the crowd slowly begins to applaud.




For the second act, the beautiful Diana descends from the rafters on a swing, holding her cat. With a dramatic flourish, she removes the cat’s glasses, and the people of the town find themselves bathed in a bright glow that reveals their true nature. For the next five or ten minutes, everything goes fucking nuts, as people leap from their seats and begin dancing and fighting and running around in a gloriously choreographed display of pseudo-psychedelic abandon. Kenneth Anger-like super-impositions are used to create fuzzy blurs of movement as patterns of brightly coloured human ebb and flow through the darkness of the grand municipal hall, interspersed with close-ups of the all-seeing eyes of the feline oracle, as the cutting and the music speeds up to a frantic, disorientating pace.

It’s pretty darn great.





As a film produced in the heady political climate of ‘60s Czechoslovakia, one might reasonably assume that there is some sort of deeper allegorical meaning to the colour-coded revelation of inner feeling going on here, but if there is, I’m damned if I can figure it out. Given the vague nature the film’s narrative logic, I suspect it’s equally likely that the filmmakers just came up with the idea for the sequence, thought it would look cool, and went with it.

At this point, I should probably draw the readers’ attention to the long-running phenomenon of more imaginative/subversive Czech filmmakers often choosing to work within the realm of children’s films and fantasies during the Communist era, on the basis that such films would be less liable to run afoul of official censorship – a tactic that can maybe be seem as one of the main factors playing into the creation of the playful, surrealistic aesthetic that went on to define much of the country’s best cinema during the later ‘60s and early ‘70s.

It is into this lineage that “Cassandra Cat” can easily be seen to fit perfectly. Though it carries no concrete ‘political’ message as such, the film has a more broadly subversive agenda that is actually quite extreme in its uncompromising anti-adult, pro-fantasy stance. For all the whimsicality on display, it is somewhat shocking to realise that, via the gaze of the cat, Jasný is essentially passing divine judgement on all of his characters, damning them as liars, adulterers, hypocrites and thieves, limiting the audience’s sympathy solely to the select few who are seen to be redeemed by their child-like ‘purity’ or their belief in love. Heady stuff for any movie really, even if it is only an explicit expression of the same ideology that can be found bubbling below the surface of thousands of kid’s stories/movies.



The anarchic spirit, visual splendour and general strangeness of “Cassandra Cat” certainly help secure it a place as a defining early example of the Czech New Wave that would emerge later in the ‘60s - a filmic movement rendered a lot more exciting than it sounds thanks to the participation of such prime celluloid dynamite hurlers as Vera Chytilová, Jaromil Jires and Václav Vorlíček (oh, go google them for chrissakes). In particular, it is notable that “Cassandra Cat”s director of photography Jaroslav Kucera went on to work on many of that movement’s defining films, perhaps accounting for the familiarity of the bright, hazy, intoxicating atmospherics that characterise many of the best sequences in this film.

But to return to the distinctly out-of-time appearance of our Devo pussycat (the English sub-titles simply call him “Tabby”, although perhaps he had a more exciting name in Czech?), my guess is that that these glasses were simply the only shape of frame that the art department could manage to balance properly on the cat’s head. Furthermore, I would theorise that the cat was still less than co-operative, as direct shots of him wearing his glasses are frustratingly rare, despite being the film’s most distinctive image, and the one used on just about all posters and publicity materials.

Anyway, in case you were wondering, Diana falls madly in love with Robert the teacher, and is distracted to the extent that she leaves town without her cat, who is left wandering around town. Naturally the adults, led by the headmaster, want to do away with the embarrassing truth-revealing varmint, and try to lock him in a bird cage with a stocking on his head. The town’s children though are very much taken with the multi-coloured chaos wrought by the cat, and begin to treat him with cult-like veneration, plastering the town with delightful cat-based artwork, and at one stage liberating the moggie and marching through the streets holding him up before them, pointing the animal in the direction of grown-ups, who flee from his transformative gaze.


How will this generational conflict resolve itself? Well…. pretty inconclusively to be honest. One problem with “Cassandra Cat” as a film is that it’s various themes and story ideas are sketched out so haphazardly that they never really manage to coalesce into anything much. As mentioned, Robert and Diana ‘fall in love’, but whilst they have a lovely time going for a boat-ride and playing checkers with wine glasses, giving much exposure to Kucera’s exquisite cinematography in the process, we are never given any inkling of what they actually see in each other. In fact Diana is never really assigned any kind of personality at all, beyond being beautiful and owning a magic cat.

On second thought though, it’s worth remembering that this IS meant to be a magical fantasy romance or whatever, and so maybe that’s exactly what her character represents – the personification of romance, as defined by our male protagonist’s imagination, with a red dress and a big, easy smile. Shallow and fleeting as you like, their scenes together have a certain apprehensive, ‘fairy gold’ quality to them, and it is by employing this kind of fantasy vs. reality logic that one can maybe get the most of what is on some levels a pretty infuriating film.



Still though: how is life in the town affected by the arrival of the cat and its aftermath? Does anything change permanently, or do things remain the same after his departure? Does the film even have a happy ending, or a sad ending? Again, I’m not really sure. Everything is so under-developed that it is often difficult to really become engaged by the film’s story beyond the level of “well.. some stuff happened”.

True, many of our favourite strange films make up for such narrative deficiencies by simply throwing so much demented chaos at us that logic ceases to matter, but sadly “Cassandra Cat” is not one of those films. In fact it is very sparing in its use of fantastic imagery, emerging instead as a faintly perplexing experience in which the viewer’s attention is directed toward a somewhat meandering story that, just like the tale told by the old man, doesn’t seem terribly concerned with making much of a point about anything. And who knows, maybe the message of the film is simply that: that telling a wacky story that fires peoples imaginations and pisses off the grown ups is its own reward, and the hell with anyone who demands some kind of contrived ‘significance’.

Half-baked scripting and anti-authoritarian magical feline antics are not usually the sort of things that endear a film to the critical establishment, but nonetheless, “Cassandra Cat” apparently made sufficient headway to see it winning the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in the same year that Fellini’s “8 1/2” and Polanski’s “Knife in the Water” were released. And if it is less well known to fans of European cinema these days than such an achievement may suggest, “Cassandra Cat” is still rich in weird and singular imagery, and an important stepping stone on the path that led a few years later to glorious, otherwordly mayhem of “Daisies”, “Valerie..” and “Saxana”. If you can stomach all the whimsical peasant stuff, it certainly makes for an interesting evening’s viewing, and if you can’t, well… I guess it really does just come back to how badly you want to see the cat wearing new wave sunglasses.