Welcome back, boils and ghouls. The alphabet project rolls on with letter #3. Coincidentally, that is the same number of licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop. At least, it is if you believe that wise-ass owl who stole candy from the creepy naked midget boy. Goddamn owls. But enough about the owls. Tonight, we’re talking about kitties. Big black ones that rip the arm off that blonde guy from Transylvania 6-5000 (“I can go to the beach now!”).
To the strains of David Bowie, several painted tribesmen (how much would it suck to be the squaw who drew the short straw and got the job of painting little dots on the asses of a bunch of sweaty, greasy warriors? Come to think of it, you‘d probably like that, wouldn‘t you?) lead a young girl to a strange-looking tree in the middle of an orange desert. They tie her to the tree and leave her. Shortly, a huge black leopard arrives and digs into its sacrificial meal.
After years of searching, creepy Paul has located his sister Irena in Europe and summoned her to their parents’ home in New Orleans. He promises to show her the sights, and disappears later that night - the same night a huge black leopard is found in a massage parlor after killing a hooker (really, which one of us hasn‘t been found in a massage parlor after killing a hooker?).
Irena takes an unusual interest in the leopard, spending loads of time at the zoo where it’s been locked up. One night she’s spotted after hours by Oliver, the curator. Running from him, she leaps up a tree before she’s cornered. After that night, she starts paling around with Oliver and his assistant/part-time lover Alice. One day while the leopard’s cage is being cleaned, it rips the arm off a worker and kills him. Later that day, the leopard is gone, and Paul re-appears at home, making the excuse that he was framed and put in prison… There’s a great deal of keeping up the pretense of not knowing Paul is a cat monster for a while longer yet, but really, no one’s fooled here. We all know Paul’s got a craving for Whiskas and whizzing in peoples’ shoes.
He makes some incestuous passes at Irena, who runs into the arms of Oliver. Irena reveals that she’s a virgin and is scared to have sex with Oliver (and she doesn’t want to have sex with Paul, obviously, because he’s her brother and she’s not from Missouri). Paul, meanwhile, continues to try to convince Irena to have sex with him. Eventually, after attacking Irena, Paul begins transforming into a black leopard. Oliver and Alice arrive and Oliver to fight with the leopard, resulting in the big cat falling out a window and dying.
When Oliver takes the leopard back to the zoo for autopsy and cuts it open, there’s a second corpse inside. A human hand flops out of its belly as sulfurous smoke fills the room and the leopard and human corpses rapidly dissolve into a puddle of goop on the autopsy table.
It’s all too much for Irena, and she gathers what little money she has left and takes a train to Richmond. Shortly after her arrival, she has a dream where Paul leads her through the desert from the beginning, to the tree where all the leopards are hanging out. He explains that their ancestors (who lived in another dimension, judging by the otherworldly feel of that unnaturally orange desert) fed their children to the leopards as sacrifices. The souls of the children took up residence in the cats, and after time, the cats gained the ability to turn human. The race of cat people have a curse on them, that they may only have sex with their own kind. If they mate with a normal human, they’ll turn back into their cat form and must kill a human before regaining their own human form.
Somehow, this dream totally changes Irena, and she returns to New Orleans, stalking Alice and Oliver with the intent of confronting her curse. She finally boinks Oliver, and is woken from her afterglow snooze by great pain. In quite a spiffy transformation sequence, she turns into a leopard and attacks Oliver, who manages to chase her off. She kills one of Oliver’s old friends, and he finds her in his crab shack in the swamp, where she strips down and asks him to help her end the curse and let her be with her own people.
The next day, Oliver hand-feeds chunks of meat to a surprisingly complacent leopard at the zoo.
There’s a lot right with Cat People, and there’s a lot wrong with it. We’ll start with the right. It’s got a strange atmosphere about it that reminds me a lot of Altered States. The theme song by David Bowie is one of his better efforts (at least, coming from a typically non-Bowie fan like myself, I dug it). The transformation scenes are fantastic, particularly Irena’s first change, where the leopard face literally explodes out of her skull. When Cat People decides to have stuff happen, it’s pretty damn cool. Unfortunately for the two-hour long movie, there’s at least forty minutes worth of nothing happening.
Paul Schrader is known for talky movies, and this is no exception. Unless you find the day-to-day workings of a zoo to be absolutely captivating, there’s not much to recommend the entire first half of the movie. Irena is like a Japanese boy in a Gamera movie, somehow gaining Level 5 security clearance to everywhere in the zoo. Her idiot wandering is what gets Transylvania 6-5000 guy’s arm torn off by kitty Paul.
There’s way too much yapping in between the kitty carnage, and much of it expects us to believe some pretty stupid stuff. When Paul re-appears after being missing for several days and explains that he was framed and put in jail, Irena’s reaction is basically, “Huh. That’s nice. Well, there’s this leopard at the zoo…” No one wonders what he got framed for?
And when kitty Paul kills the hooker, she flees from him in her underwear and falls down the stairs. As she turns around to face the leopard, her bra springs open for no apparent reason. The doofy gratuitous nudity is totally out of place in an otherwise dead serious (yet totally ridiculous) movie, just missing a “sproing!” sound effect and some Yakkity Sax to make it flat-out comic relief. It does for the movie’s credibility what President Bush does for America’s.
It’s been ages since I’ve seen the original 1940’s version, so I can’t comment much on the differences and similarities. However, given the amount of gore and titties in this version, I can’t imagine they have much in common.
So here’s the deal, Paul Schrader. You made a movie about were-leopards. You tried really hard to make it some kind of serious, soul-searching character study. You half-assedly succeeded, but in the process, you seemed to forget you were making a movie about goddamn were-leopards. It’s a good thing the guys in the FX department remembered and gave you some cool monster shots, or the only reason anyone would give a crap about this movie is the Bowie song. Come to think of it, I’m not sure too many people give a crap about it anyway. If you hate horror movies so much, STOP FUCKIN’ MAKING THEM! Pretentious douche bag.
The Moral of the Story: : If you don’t have two hours of stuff to say in your movie, DON’T MAKE A GODDAMN TWO-HOUR MOVIE!
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