Cat People

Jacques Tourneur, 1942

Joe Bob Briggs has never done me wrong. Quite the contrary, even since I started watching him on TNT some years ago (he used to have a show called MonsterVision), he’s introduced me to some of the greatest and greatest worst movies ever made. If I can ever get half of what he has going on in his columns (he also used to have a newspaper column called Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In, which you can usually buy off eBay) in mine, I’ll die a happy, if only marginally successful, man. Hell, Joe Bob’s old columns introduced me to some of my all time favorites. Basket Case - being the story of a man who caries his separated, deformed siamese-twin brother around in a picnic basket? All Joe Bob. The entire Evil Dead series? Joe Bob. So when Joe Bob gives four stars to a movie called Teenage Catgirls in Heat, I stand up and listen. Of course, when anybody even mentions a movie called Teenage Catgirls in Heat, I stand up and listen. I mean, come on, teenage catgirls. In heat. And what’s that, Joe Bob, you say the film has, “thirty-two breasts, multiple aardvarking, [and] multiple catvarking.” I’m sold.

Now, again, Joe Bob has never set me wrong. I, on the other hand, have set myself wrong multiple times. You see, Teenage Catgirls in Heat and Cat People are not the same movie, not even remotely. I, of course, accidently purchased the latter. Oh sure, I found it odd that some semi-respectably packaged picture I picked up at a retail store that doesn’t involve the packaging of my DVD purchase in an unmarked paper bag could be such a masterpiece of aardvarking, if I may blatantly steal a term, but I remained undeterred. After all, Joe Bob. Well, I put the thing in the old DVD player and, man, was I ever disappointed. First off, not only is it not the movie I thought it was, it wasn’t even a bad movie. It was good. Damn good. What’s up with that? Hell, it wasn’t even some cheapo horror movie, but a complex psychological thriller which makes use of what it doesn’t show you to create fright and suspense, rather than using crappy CGI effects or rubber costumes. It even had these two bravau sequences: one, in which a girl in a pool seems to be stalked by a panther or something from the shadows and, of course, she’s in a pool, so she can’t get out, and another, in which said girl is walking home and thinks she’s being stalked by same big game animal only for the suspense to end with me jumping out of my seat when a bus comes in from right of frame. Damn it. What’s more, I’m expecting busty nymphomaniacs with, like, cat ear barrettes, but instead get Simone Simon, this incredibly elegant and vulnerable French woman, who just drips with talent and class and who exudes the exact sort of silver screen charisma I love in actresses of her era, kind of like the great Jean Harlow. I can’t catch a break. Oh, and the plot? The plot deals with a woman (Simon) from some crazy Europe country, which has instilled in her a superstition of her turning into a killer jungle cat should she ever kiss a man. Oh, I know, still sounds like it could be pretty awful, right? But, noooooo, instead it has to be a movie from producer Val Lewton, well known for taking wonky premises and grounding them in the real world and adding a touch of the psychological to make the (minimal) weirdness believable. So, yeah, that means he never shows her turn into a cat, but largely plays her fears for the superstitions they are, while still giving them huge weight and horror to the poor girl whose fears they are. Worse, the other characters, including her husband who has to deal with clear sexual frustration (in a movie from 1942, no less) and begins to turn to his female coworker, a caring woman and not at all the mincing, husband stealing stereotype you might expect. He even brings a psychiatrist into the picture to give Simon’s fears further depth and realistic underpinnings. Awful. Just awful. I can’t tell you how furious I am that I got that instead of a reincarnated Egyptian cat cult canoodling around Texas. Unbelievable, but I only have myself to blame for watching this fantastic movie instead of a crappy one. Man, am I peeved. So, I guess I have to give it four stars and... what’s that? Joe Bob also gave Cat People four stars?

Never mind.