Cat Girl

Lost That Loving Feline

Cat Girl
1957 UK
Directed by Alfred Shaughnessy
Insignia Films
Network DVD Region 2 

Okay. So Cat Girl is a movie I’d not heard of before it came up in one of Network’s regular DVD sales. I wanted this one because, for all intents and purposes, it looked like a 1950s British remake of Val Lewton and Jacques Tournier’s Cat People (a very tiny “pocket review” of which can be found here). Also, it starred Barbara Shelley, who is an actress I loved, mainly due to her role as the extremely strong female character she played as an assistant to the two male protagonists in Hammer Films' movie adaptation of Quatermass And The Pit (which is a film you can find reviewed here and, if you so desire, you can see my small visual tribute to Barbara Shelley in that role included in my 800th Blog illustration here).

As it turns out, even though it emphasises that the film is an update of Cat People on the back cover notes of the DVD, Cat Girl is really not, in any way, a translation of the aforementioned feline themed adventure. It may well have started off to be so, for all I know, but if it was... well, so much was changed in the writing, which is not credited as being based on anything in the opening titles, that the result really is unrecognisable as anything but the very vaguest of conceptual descendants of the 1940s RKO classic.

The films both have large cats in them... that’s it. They’re not even the same cat as far as I can recall. I’m pretty sure the species in question in Cat People is a black panther where, in Cat Girl, the large cat is a standard leopard.

In Cat People, the character Irene is the victim of a Serbian family curse which threatens to transform her into a hostile panther when she loses her virginity. A large chunk of the opening is taken up with the courtship of Irene, followed by her marriage and the breakdown of that marriage for fear that her character cannot consummate said marriage without turning into a wild, jungle beast. The rest of the film then deals with her psychotherapy and her husband's affair with another woman which, after a film which is totally psychological in tone (as opposed to the actual “make-up monsters” of rival studio Universal, who RKO were competing with in their most budget conscious, creative fashion), sees Irene finally transforming into one of the titular Cat People and, when her life is taken, reverting to the corpse of the woman she once was.

Cat Girl, on the other hand, features none of the sexual hang ups of the main character in Cat People. Barbara Shelley’s character Leonora Johnson is already married at the start of the movie and her virginity a long lost feature of her past. Instead, this film deals with her inheritance, where a family curse is passed onto her and she becomes, for want of a better word, psychologically linked with the family’s pet, killer leopard. The cat comes out at night and, when it does so, some shot cuts and reveals are used to show a distinct change in Shelley’s make up... but in no time does she ever actually transform into a cat herself... although she shares the same final fate as the leopard in this film due to her psychic bond. Naturally everyone thinks she’s totally crazy because... well, you know... she thinks she’s channeling a leopard... and so she is placed in a sanitarium and, in some of the worst and hilarious movie psychiatry I’ve ever seen, released to spend time with the object of her sexual jealousy and hate, the wife of her psychologist, who was himself once her childhood crush.

So... nothing like Cat People. 

Quite the opposite, in fact, when you consider that the sexual subtext of the first film is not present in this one other than as a complete reversal. Indeed, the sexuality in Cat Girl is pretty blatant and strong, especially in a scene where we see Leonora’s shadow undressing against the wall and, certainly, given the “costume” she wears in the final act of the film... a shiny, black leather coat which seems to be her solitary piece of clothing in this section and which seems to be almost deliberately encoded as a sexual fetish. I’m guessing it was a deliberate choice in terms of the designers of the look of the film too... although there’s always a chance the actors and actresses didn’t realise it at the time.

The lighting is beautiful throughout, often creating a halo around the hair of the central characters and showing off the black and white cinematography nicely... which is lucky since there’s very little camera movement in the majority of the shots in the film and most of the movie is assembled as edits from static set ups. So the lighting does help to offset the often lack of dynamic visual motion. Thankfully, the editing is not too uninteresting in places and everything keeps ticking along at a fairly solid rate. Having said that, the film came out just a few months after Hammer’s colourful The Curse Of Frankenstein, so I’m guessing that the success of the former and the expectations it created for horror films in its wake possibly meant this particular gem had a more lukewarm reception in the year of its release, both here in the UK and stateside.

But I say “gem” because it really is.

Cat Girl is a film which is definitely “of its time” but it’s quite charming in its own way and, frankly, Barbara Shelley’s performance in this is brilliant in both its intensity and, perhaps, its bravery at the time. This is definitely another strong female role for this actress and I suspect she probably relished this part when she won it. Whether she did or didn’t, though, she certainly sank her teeth into the part, so to speak, and although a lot of the on screen shenanigans by her and the rest of the cast isn’t exactly subtle, it is passionate and, more importantly, interesting to watch. Shelley certainly has a lot of presence in this role.

The one area where I think this movie does slip up big time, however, is in the musical scoring. I was wondering who was murdering the film with all the heavy handed compositions while I was watching but, as it turns out, it’s not the work of one composer but a range of different composers’ stock music tracked in and used here. All I can say is that, though these pieces may have been useful in their own right and in certain situations, as a score for this movie they are a fair degree less than subtle and it’s such a shame because, with some more appropriate cues, or even some of the same ones knocked down a little bit in the mix, they might well have given the film a little more lift and support in certain scenes. So that’s a pity.

Other than that, though, I would well recommend this movie for audiences who have a taste for old school British horror curios and I’m well pleased that Network have put this little beauty out in a digital format. Not one for all modern horror audiences, for sure, especially as there are no real scares to be had, but certainly something which does its own thing and, perhaps, even pushes the sexual envelope a little for its time, at least in terms of the overt references you could get away with in a commercial release of the period, I suspect. Definitely a movie I plan to be returning to at some point.

The Terrornauts

Terror Firma

The Terrornauts
1967 UK
Directed by Montgomory Tully
Amicus via Network DVD Region 2

Warning: Kinda spoilers here I guess, although it’s not the 
kind of film I would worry about that kind of thing for.

When I first found out a few years ago there was a late sixties sci-fi movie made which had Charles Hawtrey in it... I set about trying to find it immediately, but to no avail. The mixture of the Carry On star and a movie which had a title like The Terrornauts was just too irresistible for me to bear. Alas, my search bore no fruit but, luckily, Network DVD have come to my rescue with their brand new release at a more than reasonable price (aka value for money... aka cheap).

In all honesty, I bought this film for a laugh because I couldn’t conceive of this movie being any good but, as luck would have it, it’s really a charming curio which I wish I’d known about earlier and, maybe, had the opportunity to see as a kid.

The Network DVD has two different prints on it. A sharp transfer of the trimmed re-release version of the movie and, hidden in the extras menu, the original full theatrical release which, to be fair, does say it has a noticeable drop in quality. Well, I suspect most of the audience who want to see such movies as this one are going to prefer watching a not very good print of the longer version rather than a crystal clear print of the shortened version, so that’s the one I’m reviewing here. I’m glad I did choose that version to watch too because there is an alien creature in one scene which is both a badly suspect costume while simultaneously being a triumph of surrealism in design. You kinda have to see it to believe it but, when I went through the chapter menu of the film so I could show my dad the bizarre and noteable monster, it wasn’t there. I soon realised that the scene must have been cut from the shorter version of the film so... if you want to see a cool (for possibly the wrong reasons) monster, then you need to watch the bad quality version, I’m afraid. But the monster really makes up for any drop in quality... since the drop’s not half as long as your jaw will drop when you see this thing.

When I saw on the credits that the screenplay was written by the legendary John Brunner (from a novel called The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinster), I realised that this film might not be the unintentional laugh fest I was expecting and, as it happens, my suspicions were proven correct.

The film stars Simon Oates, Bond girl Zena Marshall and Stanley Meadows who, along with an accountant and a tea lady played respectively by British comedy actors Charles Hawtrey and Patricia Hayes, along for comic relief, make contact with a signal from space... the source of which promptly sends a spaceship to Earth to haul them, and the building they are in, back to an abandoned asteroid base manned by alien robots. Here, our heroes are put through through a series of intelligence tests before revealing how they can save humanity from certain death at the hands of an oncoming fleet of space aliens (presumably, The Terrornauts of the title).

The film is, in a word, charming.

The colours, including an abundance of pinky reds and faded greens are amazing (and what I’d expect from my experience of the two Doctor Who films put out by the same studio) and all the characters are pretty much likeable. Patricia Hayes’ “tea lady common sense” is especially endearing as the group encounter alisen concepts on the asteroid.

The story is really interesting too in that it doesn’t really follow a formula so much and there’s lots of different things pulled together to make the short running time of the movie seem anything but padded. For example, two of the characters have a short romp on an alien planet when Zena Marshall gets accidentally teleported there and has to be rescued by Simon Oates from green skinned aliens who want to sacrifice her to... um... whoever they want to sacrifice her to. Luckily, our hero is armed with a space gun so the primitive spears of the tribe prove no match for him. Actually, the consistency of the way the teleporter works and the way it gets our heroes out of a hole towards the end of the film is somewhat inconsistent and convenient, to say the least, but if you’re not taking the film too seriously (and by this point, you probably won’t be) then you’ll have a fine time with it.

The special effects are a bit ropey in certain sequences - the alien monster costume, for example, or the twin moons of a planet which are obviously painted onto a piece of glass in front of the camera lens - but this all just adds to the charm and I have to say, to the general atmosphere of the film. The music, too, by famous concert composer Elizabeth Lutyens (The Earth Dies Screaming, The Skull) is pretty good... apart from maybe the comic interlude she uses for the entrance of Charles Hawtrey into the narrative. This is yet another one of her scores that I would have hoped to have been made accessible to us at some point. Her film scores seem, like most of her works, actually, sadly under-represented on CD or download.

So will science-fiction fans love this movie or not? Well, I guess some of them will but those looking for some hard core sci-fi movie might be best to stay away. If, however, you’re in the market for a charming, late sixties British sci-fi movie and are happy with the kinds of failings and the big rewards that such films can unfold before you, then you’re going to have a real blast with The Terrornauts. It’s time to give this under-rated gem of a movie a go but, if you do, I’d definitely recommend you watch the longer cut which is found in the extras menu of this new Network edition.