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Director: Lucio Fulci
Year: 1981
Country: Italy
Alternate Titles: Gatto nero
Genre: Nature-Run-Amok
Plot:
After a strange series of deaths, a woman in a small town joins up with a Scotland Yard investigator, where they find an eccentric man's troubled black cat is being driven to kill by his psychically powered thoughts and race to stop his deadly rampage.
Review:
This one here wasn't all that bad of an effort. One of its better features here is the fact that this one really goes for the exceptional Gothic atmosphere, which not only belies its source material but also works for the film as a whole. The general concept of the socialist investigating the dead in the manner depicted here, using the different paranormal instruments in a quest to unlock the secrets of life after death, feels incredibly Gothic in origin, while also working in a typically Gothic reasoning that ultimately ties them together. As well, that forces the film into the scenes of him in the fog-enshrouded graveyards tampering with his tools or walking along the streets as it rolls along, making for a wholly chilling atmosphere for this one.
Another enjoyable feat here is that their connection to each other also gives this one some really enjoyable attack scenes featuring the cat, which, for the most part, are pretty shocking in concept and rather realistic in execution. The opening attack in the car gets this one going along nicely, the ambush of the couple inside the boating house comes off as really chilling once they've realized they're trapped and the stalking of the lone victim on the town streets as it continually leaps out of the darkness all give this one quite a lot to really love about this one by employing really fun action scenes.
Still, the film's best scenes here are the cats' stalking of the drifter into the abandoned warehouse where it chases him onto the upper floors before leading to a spectacular death and a great scene of it intentionally starting a fire in one victims' house while they're still inside leading to a grand finale which is quite action-packed here which makes for rather impressive scenes here. As these scenes not only give off some nice gore effects and the ability to see the cats' impressive skills at work, they hold this one up over its few flaws.
One issue with this one is the excessive use of close-ups throughout here, which gets tiring very quickly as the character's eyes and nose ridge are on-screen more than the cat is. There's an extremely alarming amount of them spread throughout by just about all of the characters, and they become distracting after a while. Another big problem is the almost incredulous plot. The fact that the cat is never really dismissed as a potential suspect is quite troubling, as the fact that a little cat can take out large victims is passed off as being plausible from the very start. Strangely, in a film like this, it needs to hedge the doubt about it a little more, especially from the police inspectors, to make their contributions a little more believable. The film's biggest problem, though, is the pacing, which spends a lot of time doing nothing in particular, which leads to a lot of downtime. Otherwise, there's not much to dislike here.
Overview: ***.5/5
Wrongfully maligned for a decent film, this was a rather solid entry that comes across rather nicely for what it is, while still being just slightly let down by some minor drawbacks. Those with an appreciation for this kind of genre effort, who enjoy this era of European genre cinema, or who are fans of the creative crew, will have a lot to like, while most others out there should heed caution.
This review is part of our ongoing series of reviews for Italian Horror Month, every November on the site:
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