There were some strong trends in the early 1980’s which identify a picture as being of that vintage. There was a significant increase in gore of the likes one had not previously seen in the output of the major studios. You also had much stronger sexual content that had been in such fare previously. And, as much as Hollywood has always found merit in revisiting an old property, there was a noticeable uptick in remakes around that time. If somebody was to do a Venn diagram with those three attributes, 1982’s Cat People would be solidly in the intersection.
This is an update of the same-named Val Lewton classic from exactly four decades earlier. Curiously, it jettisons so much from the original as to make it seem to be oblivious to its predecessor. Then it shoehorns in a recreation of the earlier film’s most famous scene, but where it puts it throws off the pacing.
While discarding much that was the appeal of the 1942 movie, it adds little of interest to take its place. The most drastic change is taking the original’s theme of suppressed lesbian urges and swapping that with incest. This does not make for a superior work.
The lead this time is Nastassja Kinski. In the first real scene of the runtime, she has arrived at the airport in New Orleans, where she is greeted by Malcolm McDowell. I was very confused by her not knowing what he looks like, given he is her brother. Turns out these two had been separated since they were very young, with her being in an orphanage for the remainder of her childhood.
He takes her home, where she is introduced to a housekeeper played by Ruby Dee. Her name is Female, though it is pronounced with “Fee-mall-ay” because somebody who assisted at her birth did not know how to pronounce the English word for the baby’s gender. By any chance, was the doctor who brought her into the world A Christmas Story‘s Darren McGavin? I was wondering if there was any possibility her name could have just as easily have been “Frad-gee-lay”.
Dee’s voodoo housekeeper thing is part and parcel with a pastiche of cliches (clistiche?) like this, something which afflicts so many pictures based in N’awlins. Naturally, the house will be a kind of southern gothic mansion, even if it is a rowhouse. There will be walks in a cemetery with those above-ground graves. I was shocked there weren’t any scenes set in the time of Mardi Gras, though there will be a cabinet full of creepy-ass masks which inexplicably enchant Kinski.
Those are the sad remains of the circus legacy of the sibling’s parents. That there isn’t Mardi Gras, but there is a circus element, seems fitting. And, given how obvious it is early on that McDowell has less-than-wholesome designs on his sister, the incest motif gives this production a feeling of a play by Tennessee Williams as scored by a calliope. That there is juggling is not a surprise.
But Williams’s works rarely had body horror transformations of people turning into big cats. The special effects work done here is in the wheelhouse of what was being done in such contemporaneous pictures as An American Werewolf in London, though what we see here is less impressive. Some scenes were somehow equal parts gross and ridiculous, and I laughed out loud at a moment where the autopsy of a leopard reveals a deeply fake human arm within.
That isn’t Ed Begley, Jr’s, arm, though he does lose one in what is the film’s most effective moment of gore. He is part of a curiously stacked cast, even if many of those in bit parts were yet to be household names. John Heard is really the co-lead, despite being billed below McDowell. Annette O’Toole, in the best performance here, is his co-worker at the zoo, as well as being his scorned lover once he sees Kinski. John Larroquette has a cameo as a bureaucrat.
As if that isn’t enough, you have a soundtrack by Georgio Moroder, making this one of the most solidly 80s movies of the 80’s. Some of his score could be titled “Love Theme from Not Blade Runner”, thus proving when one couldn’t get Vangelis, they would get Moroder, with Tangerine Dream your next fallback. There is also a title tune by David Bowie, which should lend the project more credibility, except his currency was becoming suspect at this point, with the legendary comeback album Let’s Dance still a year in the future.
Another sure-fire sign you’re watching an early 80’s movie is some of the imagery is the kind of eye-rollingly pretentious dreck with which the advertising industry was obsessed at the time. The very first imagery in the runtime takes place in an obvious set which is supposed to be a desert made of deeply red sand. It looks like it is going to be a perfume commercial from the era. Instead, what we see is a bit of magical realism (which, as usual, means something that is neither magical nor realistic) in which painted men abduct a woman from a village and tie her to a tree to await the arrival of a leopard and blah blah blah. This red desert may not be Antonioni’s Red Desert, but it is nearly as insufferable.
When the film isn’t self-important, it is horny. True to the style of the time, sweaty couplings on the screen do not necessarily equal titillation, even though there is a moment of mild S&M. No, wait, especially when there is a moment of mild S&M. One might mistakenly think the 70’s were a puritanical era given how the 80’s seem to be a reaction to that mindset.
Between the sex without sensuality and the ridiculous pompousness, there are many moments of unintentional humor. McDowell may be able to channel some big cat swagger, but he didn’t sell me on being able to leap from the floor to the end of Kinski’s bed with feline grace. That an ADR’d growl is supposed to come from him had me howling with laughter. At least he doesn’t have Kinski’s bizarre accent, which is vaguely Americanish, though it wanders through the various parts of the country and maybe even into Canada. And, like McDowell, she can also leap great distances, and I was hoping a bit where she is suddenly at the top of a tree would necessitate the intervention of a fire department’s ladder truck to rescue her.
When the movie isn’t bad or boring, it is weird, though not by design. Ray Wise has an odd cameo in the soap opera the zoo animals are watching on televisions, seemingly foretelling his turn nearly a decade later on Twin Peaks. A copy of a Mishima biography on Heard’s nightstand foretells writer/director Paul Schrader’s eventual biopic of the man, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. A moment where Kinski yells “Don’t look at me!” while her mouth is covered in blood seems to predict Dennis Hopper’s delivery of the same line in Blue Velvet, where he similarly had lipstick smeared all over the lower half of his face.
Roger Ebert inexplicably gave Cat People half a star shy of his highest rating. I suspect it is because the man admired boobs, and I can relate to that. Unless something is truly pornography, I need context, and this surprisingly unsexy erotic thriller does not provide much in that regard which interested me. As usual, my wife had a great zinger of an assessment at the end: “That was one dog of a cat movie.”
Dir: Paul Schrader
Starring Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O’Toole
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray