Night of 1000 Cats

Sophisticated, international playboy, Hugo (Hugo Stiglitz) loves women. He flies around in his helicopter, wearing enormous sunglasses, while various females smile like they've got coat hangers stuck in their mouths.

Hugo hovers. He zooms.

He takes women back to his fortress-like bachelor villa / monastery, where his faithful servant, Dorgo (Gerardo Zepeda) awaits, looking as though he spends his days inhaling oven cleaner.

Inside, Hugo shows off by tossing cats like beanbags, into their enclosure. Soon, it's time for Hugo to unveil his collection of severed heads. He's a man of many talents. Murdering his girlfriends for their noggins is one of them. This allows him to feed their bodies to his cat swarm. Hugo doesn't believe in being wasteful.

It's not long before he's airborne again, hovering over women and their swimming pools. They can't ignore his subtlety, since he floats three feet above them!

They want to go with him. They must go with him!

Yes, he rides a motorcycle too. It allows him to hover closer. Hugo is persistent, and always gets his female lover / head donation / cat food. Hugo is a haunted man. He only loved one woman. Her head is his favorite. All of his "girlfriends" have one thing in common: Their heads are more productive in their plastic boxes than they were on their shoulders!

THE NIGHT OF A THOUSAND CATS must be witnessed by every living being!

Hugo waxes philosophical! He plays chess while smoking his pipe! He hovers over more swimming pools than an Olympic diver! He is irresistible to women! The pointlessness of this movie is beyond measure. Is it a metaphor for life itself? Only Hugo knows for sure.

P.S.- I want a villa / monastery! I want a Dorgo! I want a thousand cats! Where's my helicopter? Let's fly!...

Night of a 1000 Cats was not the masterpiece of Mexican exploitation I expected it to be, but is still a solid little gem of low budget filmmaking. Hey, René Cardona Jr. is directing it, and Hugo Stiglitz plays the lead, and thats all I needed anyway. As usual Hunky Hugo plays a rich playboy womanizer, but in this film he is a little more psycho than usual. He lures women to his old gothic mansion, makes sweet love and kills them. He feeds his hungry cats with their bodies, but preserves their heads and adds them to his "collection". No reason is given for Hugo's deviant behavior and his "minimal face expression" approach to acting certanly isn't helping us understand the character. We do get ordinary "I want you to stay with me forever. FOREVER" -clichés thrown in our faces, but they don't make much sense since Hugo seems to be a well-adjusted fellow with no social problems. The other problem I had with "1000 Cats" is the same one that another commentator pointed out: it's very hard to separate Hugo's women, since they all look pretty much alike and all share the same (minimal) personality. The film's constantly moves in and out of flashback, which only adds to the confusion. So, here we have an underwritten, underplayed (but hunky!) character killing what seems like the same woman over and over again. The characters in the film just doesn't work, (except for Hugo's mute butler Dorgo, the mad monk. Right on!). The film could have been slightly faster paced too.

So, what DOES work?

First of all, this is a René Cardona Jr.-flick and it is my firm belief that everyone of his films are worth watching, at least once. His films always have a certain "feel" to them, that I can't explain but enjoy very much. They all have that little extra something that seperates them from similiar (some say identical, but what do they know?) films. Although low budget productions, he always manages to squeeze the best out of his pesetas and present a good looking, well edited and charmy product that delivers the goods, whatever they might be. "1000 Cats" is no exception. In many aspects, it's not what it shows, but what it doesn't show that makes it work. Sure the characters are flat, and the story doesn't make sense, but at least it's everybody and everything is nice to look at, fairly fast paced, well crafted and directed. Just imagine how awful it COULD have been if none of those components would have been there.

Maybe I'm in a forgiving mode, but:

6/10

This movie was recommended to me by an ardent lover of the sick and twisted. I thought that the worst was given away too early, and the film does get caught up in the tedious and seemingly unlikely hunt for new victims. Yet, the film is brief, and does offer enough consistency in characters to allow the genre fan to dispense with realistic expectations. It's not a bad psycho-killer flick - it's horrificly bad.

This is a strange and plot less movie about a psychopath (Hugo Stiglitz) who flies around Mexico City's poshest neighborhoods in his helicopter picking up sexy, bikini-clad women whom he then takes back to his castle where he has sex with them, murders them, pickles their heads, and feeds the remains to the titular "mil gatos" that he keeps in his basement.

Director Rene Cardona Jr. never made what could really be considered a "good" movie in any sense of the word, and this one is especially inept. A serial killer isn't exactly going to be too inconspicuous flying around the ritzy suburbs in a helicopter. Hugo Stiglitz was probably a lot less irresistible to women than Cardona Jr. seemed to think he was in movies like this and "Tintorera". And if one wants to dispose of bodies, a few good-size hogs would do the job a lot more efficiently (and quietly) than 1,000 yowling cats. Also, I might point out that the action of this movie takes place over a lot more than a single night, in fact very little of the action even happens at night.

Basically though faulting the movie's frequent lapses in logic is really missing the point. What Cardona Jr. seems to be trying to do is string together a lot of visually interesting scenes with the slenderest plot strands imaginable, making a movie that is about half avante-garde and half exploitative trash. Unfortunately, some of these scenes aren't too interesting to begin with (the helicopter footage) and some just go on too long (a strange interlude where the killer watches one leggy would-be victim doing a showgirl routine). Some scenes, however, are pretty interesting--especially the scenes with the cats. And as usual Cardona Jr. has lured a number of pretty European actresses (Anjanette Comer, Cristine Linder) to Mexico to swap bodily fluids with Stiglitz and become cat chow. I hope they at least got a nice Mexican vacation out of it!

This movie should be called Night of 1000 Hours of Helicopter Scenes. If you want to see some sick guy spend twenty minutes flying a helicopter, then somehow seducing a woman by buzzing around her house and stalking her, then maybe you would like this walking disease. Also, instead of 1000 cats, more like 70, and during the climatic end scenes, only 10 cats, with the same scene shown over again until you want to puke. Only good for making fun of. The one redeeming thing about this film was the video I saw it on was made out of yellow plastic, I had never seen that before. In conclusion, I would rather have toxoplasmosa than see this again. Thank you.