It’s an attempt to set the story in the 1960s while still retaining as much of the Poe flavour as possible. This is Poe but in the world of crazy rock’n’roll music, miniskirts and go-go dancing. This works better than you might expect.
A rich rather decadent young man named Lou (Robert Frost) lives on the fortune he inherited from his parents. He plays at being a tortured writer. His pretty blonde wife Diana (Robyn Baker) buys him a black cat as a present. He calls the cat Pluto.
The wife is devoted but she feels neglected. Lou spends most of his time drinking and writing.
Lou had apparently been a sensitive child but there are hints that his relationships with his parents were not exactly healthy and he hates his deceased father.
Lou is spiralling downwards into madness, and it’s a mean nasty madness. He comes to believe that the cat is a demon. The key to Lou’s madness seems to be his attempts to blame anybody but himself for his problems. He thinks his father was out to get him. He thinks his wife is against him. And he thinks the cat is out to get him.
He blinds the cat in one eye, and later kills the cat.
If you’re sensitive to animal cruelty you might think twice about viewing this movie. It’s pretty obvious that there was no actual animal cruelty involved in the making of the movie. All the scenes involving animal cruelty are quite clearly faked, but there’s a great deal of implied animal cruelty.
After further displays of madness and evil Lou ends up in a lunatic asylum. A few months later he is released. The well-meaning psychiatrist is confident that Lou is cured. We will soon find out that his confidence is sadly misplaced.
Lou is soon drinking again. He is still obsessed with demons, and when he meets a hooker in a bar he decides she is a witch. He sees black cats everywhere. Things are not likely to end well.
I do enjoy movies about psychiatry, especially if (as is the case here) there is half-baked Fruedianism involved. The combination of psychobabble and demonic obsessions makes this movie even more enticing from my point of view.
Robert Frost might not be a very good actor but he does manage to be very scary. It’s an effectively disturbing performance. Robyn Baker is not the world’s greatest actress but she does OK as the wife who just can’t give up on her husband even as his madness and evil become more obvious.
This is a rather nasty mean-spirited movie but it does have some genuinely chilling moments and some effectively creepy moments as well. Harold Hoffman didn’t have much of a career and he certainly wasn’t a brilliant director but he achieves plenty of menace and foreboding. This is an odd horror movie but it’s strange 1960s gothic decadent vibe is interesting and surprisingly works very well.
It manages to feel like a Poe story and follows Poe’s plot surprisingly closely. The very low budget is obvious and the special effects look very cheap but the sinister atmosphere and the very gothic feel of inescapable impending doom makes up for this. This is a very dark rather effective horror chiller and it’s highly recommended.
This movie is part of a Something Weird DVD double-header, paired with The Fat Black Pussycat. The Black Cat gets a letterboxed transfer. It doesn’t exactly look pristine but I suspect finding a decent print proved next door to impossible. You get some oddball extras including a truly bizarre cat-themed burlesque routine.
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