PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 552

Thanks to Amazon Prime we can see a copy of Curse Of The Faceless Man on the Roku. There is a 2006 DVD but it's one of those print on demand ones and it's 20 bucks, so we aren't going to be bothering with that. Not when you can also see it on YouTube for free. It's a 1958 movie with a script by Jerome Bixby. Sadly it's not one of Jerome's better scripts. Edward L. Cahn directed, he also directed Creature With The Atomic Brain, Invasion of the Saucer Men and The Four Skulls Of Jonathan Drake. It was originally released on a double feature with another of Edward's films It! The Terror from Beyond Space.

Richard Anderson is a doctor who gets called in examine a petrified body that was discovered in Pompeii's Egyptian section. I didn't even know they had an Egyptian section. Some golden artifacts were discovered in a chest along with the body. In the chest is a bronze medallion with Etruscan writing on it. Luis Van Rooten plays Dr Carlo Fiorillo and Adele Mara plays his daughter Maria. They are both archaeologists who work for the same museum. The Griffith Observatory, filmed rather close up to disguise the familiar dome, subs for the outside of the museum. I wonder how many movies have been filmed there? The IMDb has 102 titles on it's page for the place, a lot of them are TV shows. I've seen quite a number of them.

The petrified body comes to life in the truck transporting it to the museum and the truck driver dies. At first no one believes that it could be the petrified body doing the killing. The police are baffled. Richard's girlfriend, played by Elaine Edwards, has weird dreams of the creature and the truck driver. She's produced a painting of the creature without ever seeing it. People are troubled by this, especially Elaine.

That's Richard and Elaine up above. She seems to attract the creature. He keeps dropping in. Like Universal's film The Mummy Elaine turns out to be the reincarnation of the creature's past love. At one point he walks off with her body and heads for the sea. They figure he's trying to pick up with what he was doing when the volcano erupted. He wants to get her to the sea so they can escape.

Sadly the creature doesn't find safety in the sea but Elaine is saved. It's a short movie, only 67 minutes, but it seems longer. It was nice to see it but I don't think I would need to see it some more.

  

The 1920 version of The Golem: How He Came Into The World was next. It's a German film released here by Kino Video. They've got a fairly good restored version with tinted film. It looks quite nice. It's written by Henrik Galeen and Paul Wegener who adapted the 1915 novel by Gustav Meyrink. Paul and Carl Boese were the directors and Paul plays the Golem on top of that. Paul had previously directed two versions of The Golem, one in 1915 and the second, a prequel, The Golem And The Dancing Girl, two years later. He wasn't as happy as he could be with those and he tried again in 1920.

In medieval Prague Rabbi Loew reads the stars and predicts terrible things will happen to the Jews in the Ghetto. Sure enough the Emperor wants all of them to leave. He sends a knight to tell the Rabbi to move his people. The knight falls for the Rabbi's daughter Miriam. The Rabbi's assistant has a thing for Miriam but she isn't as interested. The Rabbi talks the knight into taking a message to the Emperor to remind him of his help in the past predicting disasters and the like. The Emperor grants a visit and the Rabbi brings the Golem along to show him off. That turned out to be a good thing when the Golem saves the Emperor's life. The Jews can stay.

Back home later the Rabbi reads the stars which will cause the demon Astaroth to turn the Golem into a ruthless killing machine. He shuts down the Golem but the assistant, on discovering the canoodling going on between the knight and Miriam, starts the Golem up. The knight is killed and the Golem goes on a spree of destruction. Poor Miriam is dragged through the streets by her long pigtails.

It was entertaining though a bit slow going. The Kino version looks fairly good and there's some nice music. Worth a look for it's social significance if nothing else.

The Time Of Their Lives 1946

The guys return later in 1946 with their 15th movie for Universal Studios since 1940. The Time Of Their Lives was shot at a time when Abbott and Costello were still having trouble getting along. The team disbanded temporarily but managed to make a couple of movies. The lure of the cash was pretty hard to resist. The movie was written by Walter Deleon, Val Burton and Bradford Ropes. Charles Barton is the director and it's the first of 8 films he did with Abbott and Costello.

Bud plays a revolutionary war era guy who's shot and tossed down a well. People thought he was a traitor but there's proof in a letter from George Washington that would clear him of that. Other than a brief scene, with  alive in the past, most of the movie is set in modern day. Marjorie Reynolds is the girlfriend of Jess Barker who Lou comes to visit. Lou has a letter of commendation from General George Washington. He hopes to use it to convince Jess to let him marry Anne Gillis, the housemaid. Bud plays the butler and he has eyes on Anne himself.

The letter goes to Anne who overhears Bud plotting with Benedict Arnold. She gets caught and Bud who hides the letter in a clock. Marjorie goes to warn Washington but she and Lou get shot attacking American soldiers and tossed down that convenient well. The house is looted, goodbye click, and burned to the ground. Lou and Marjorie are doomed to the plantation until they are cleared.

In modern day the house is rebuilt and the surviving furniture is bought and brought to the house. John Shelton plays Jess's descendent and he's the one who restored the house. Bud plays Jess's psychiatrist and the descendant of the Jess's butler. John invited him to spend the night at the estate. Lynn Baggett plays John's fiancé and Binnie Barnes plays Lynn's Aunt. Gale Sondergaard plays the maid who believes in ghosts.

Bud and Marjorie scare the guests a bit before figuring out that the letter might be in the house. The live ones decide to have a séance and they learn who the ghosts are. They learn that the letter is in a clock at a museum in New York. Bud goes to steal it so he can atone for his ancestors sin and release Bud and Marjorie. It's pretty silly and a laughed a fair bit. Kirk Alyn plays a dandy but he's only in the film a bit.

Lou acted up a good bit during the filming. A few weeks into the production Lou wanted to switch roles with Bud but they wouldn't let him. Lou refused to work for a bit but eventually caved and didn't mention it again. There's a commentary on the film by film historian Frank Thompson and he said that Lou decided he liked a grandfather clock on the set and took it home. The problem was the set was still "hot" and they couldn't shot without it. Lou would only return it after they promised he could take it home after they were done. Bud had to drive a car and had to learn before the picture. His son says it was the only time Bud ever drove a car.

Val Lewton - I Walked With A Zombie 1943

 I Walked With A Zombie is a 1943 horror film written by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray. Curt wrote the first version of the script and Ardel worked on it after Curt moved on to other work. The screen credit says the story is based on an article called I Walked With A Zombie by Inez Wallace, published in American Weekly Magazine, but Lewton didn't care for that so he adapted the story to fit the novel Jane Eyre because he felt the article's plot was too clichéd. It's directed by Jacques Tourneur and it was Val Lewton's 2nd horror film for RKO Pictures.

Frances Dee plays a Canadian nurse named Betsy who travels to the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian. She's going to be taking care of plantation owner Paul Holland's wife Jessica. Paul is played by Tom Conway whom some will remember from all sorts of movies in the 30s and 40s. He played The Saint, The Falcon, Bulldog Drummond, Sherlock Holmes and the psychiatrist in Cat People. James Ellison plays Wesley Rand, he's Paul's half-brother and works for him. Christine Gordon plays Jessica Holland. Edith Barrett plays Mrs Rand, the mother of Paul and Wesley.

There's a lot of melodrama mixed in with the horror. Jessica is in a zombie like state that the doctor says is from a fever. We find out, in song, from Sir Lancelot, that Wesley and Jessica were going to run away together. Paul wouldn't let them go and a bit later Jessica develops that fever. Wesley thinks that Paul is responsible.  Alma, housemaid, tells Betsy that the Voodoo priest can cure Jessica. At the Voodoo gathering some natives poke a sword into Jessica and she doesn't bleed. The natives want do some more ritual tests but Betsy takes her home.

Mrs Rand claims that she put the curse on Jessica for trying to leave with Wesley. She thinks she was possessed by a Voodoo god. Paul and Betsy don't believe her but Wesley thinks it's all true and he want to free Jessica from her endless death. HE stabs her with an arrow and then carries her body into the sea. The locals find their bodies in the surf while fishing. Paul and Betsy start their new lives together.

It's a nice compact film, only 69 minutes, with a good script and an interesting story. It's kind of low-impact horror and not gory at all. The sets and cast are good and there's plenty of moody atmosphere created by all sort of light and shadows. It's well worth seeing. There aren't many extras on these discs, mostly a trailer but this film has a commentary by Kim Newman and Steve Jones. The two of them spend a good portion of the commentary track enjoying themselves. They pass along a good bit of information about the film and the people on both sides of the camera. It was worth listening to.

B-Movie Blast Disc 4

The fourth disc of the B-Movie Blast 50 Movie set changes up the genre to action with motorcycle gangs, racing cars and a nautical drug smuggling adventure. They're all Crown International films.

The Wild Rebels is a 1967 film written and directed by William Grefé. It was used in an episode of MST3K. Steve Alaimo plays a stock car racer who isn't doing too well. He sells out and soon runs into some bikers who, learning he's a race car driver, figure to use him to drive their getaway car in a robbery. They make their living stealing but Steve isn't much interested so he makes out with one of their chick and leaves. The cops recruit him and convince him to spy on the gang. The gang accepts him in and off they go to rob a bank. Things go on for a while as the cops chase after the gang and eventually there's a big shoot out at a lighthouse. Steve manages to survive even though the movie isn't very good. There isn't much by way of talent in the movie but they don't have much of a script either. There's a couple of laughs but the characters aren't very likeable, smart or interesting. It scores a mighty 2 on the IMDb and it's not really much better than that.

Hell On Wheels is a 1967 racing car movie about Marty Robbins the race car driver with Marty playing himself. It's written by Wesley Cox and directed by Will Zens. Marty's brother works as his mechanic but he wants to break out on his own. He sets up a car repair shop to make some money after he and Marty have a big argument. He takes on work from booze smugglers and gets in some trouble. There's several musical numbers from Marty and the Stonemans. Sadly much of the movie is pretty darn dull, there aren't really any good actors and the script is below average. The races go on too long and aren't at all interesting. It's kind of entertaining for what it is and you can see what you think at the link in the title above.

 

The Sidehackers came out in 1969 and it's also known as Five The Hard Way. It too was an episode of MST3K. It's written by Larry Billman and Tony Huston. The director is Gus Trikonis who was also an actor and dancer. It was Gus's first movie and that year was the year he married Goldie Hawn. The stayed together until 1976. Gus's next movie was Supercock which he followed by a bunch of other low budget films. Ross Hagan is the producer and lead actor. He's playing a guy on the sidehacking circuit. He meets JC and his biker gang. They want him to join them but he says no. JC rapes and kills Ross's wife after his girlfriend claims Ross raped her. He didn't and after he finds his girlfriend dead he gets a gang together for some vengeance. There's a big shoot out in Sadly the plot is muddied by poor acting, and an uninteresting bunch of characters reading a poor script. Not for nothing does it score a 1.6 on the IMDb. You can see both the movie and the MST3K version on YouTube.

Dangerous Charter is a 1962 release that was made in 1958. It's got a screenplay by Paul Strait who adapted director Robert Gottschalk's story. This is Robert's only directorial work but that's ok, he'll be remembered for his behind the scenes work and unfortunate death. Here's a bit from his IMDb bio page.

He bought an interest in a camera shop and later got to know a nearby outfit that made underwater filming equipment for Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Equipment restrictions at the time made wide-angle filming difficult, and Gottschalk began experimenting with anamorphic lens equipment patented by Henri Chrétien. In 1953, the CinemaScope process, based on Chrétien's patents, was purchased and named by 20th Century Fox. While the camera lenses were now available, the process required projection lenses as well. Gottschalk teamed up with several colleagues and began offering projection lenses under the name Panavision, which used prismatic rather than cylindrical optics. This led to a successful expansion into lenses for cameras which are still widely used. He was president of Panavision, Inc., manufacturer of motion picture equipment, for 25 years.

Gottschalk was a two time Academy Award winner. His first award was a Special Technical Oscar, awarded in 1960 for the development of the MGM Camera 65 widescreen photographic system. He shared the Oscar with MGM executive Douglas Shearer and Panavision co-founder John R. Moore. He received an Academy Award of Merit in 1978 for developing the Panaflex camera.

Of course most of those film cameras will be long in the future as the world goes digital but new cameras still need lens. Sadly Robert was murdered in 1982.

In Dangerous Charter a small fishing boat finds a big yacht drifting on the ocean. The crew boards and finds a single dead man. They tow the ship in for salvage and the police come visiting. The police think that the people who abandoned the yacht were drug smugglers who probably left a stash of drugs on the ship. The crew is planning on using the yacht for tours along the coast and the police want to use them as bait for the criminals. Sure enough they criminals are onboard the ship when it takes off for it's cruse. They take over the yacht but the crew fight back. I was pleasantly surprised. It's not a great movie, it only scores a slightly low 4.4 on the IMDb, but it's entertaining. It's short, only 74 minutes, and it moves along nice and quickly. You can see it at the link above. Maybe you'll like it.

WPC 56 Series 2

There's more melodrama, heartbreak and sadness in the little Midland town where WPC 56 is still working as a cop in Series 2 of WPC 56. It just popped up at the library the other week and I took it home the other day. I breezed through them pretty quickly, there are only five 45 minute episodes. 

The first episode has the man WPC 56 loves leave the force to take care of his mentally ill wife. She was dumb to think something like that could work out. The Chief Constable had seen them kiss and he thinks she's easy so he starts sexually harassing her. The Captain turns out to be a secret gay man in a town where they lock people up for that. On top of that he's got trouble at home.

Mean sergeant Fenton is involved with a madam at a brothel owned by the local super villain Lenny. There's a man dead in a room and that leads to a woman being held captive at the brothel. Lenny's making her work off the dead man's gambling debt. The madam lets her go and winds up dead. WPC 56 goes under cover at a night club and gets involved with the bar owner Chris. Another dumb move only made worse when it turns out that Chris is Lenny's son. Chris turns out to have killed the madam, you know, things just got out of hand.

The Chief Constable goes down hard and will resign, with a bit of a cover up, leaving WPC 56 frustrated with the system. Lenny gets nicked, escapes and gets caught again. WPC 56 has to kill Chris at the end of the last episode. The end of the last episode has the Captain telling her there will be an inquiry.

There are a few other subplots mixed in with the main story line and they're pretty sad too. A 15 year old girl falls for a young carney at the fairgrounds. They won't let her runaway with him then he gets run over by a bus. Sucks to live in that town. There's a new secretary at the station and a couple of new coppers. The writing is good even if the characters aren't. The acting is good, the sets and props and locations all great. It kept me tuned in until the end. I might not need to see the series again. Series 3 and 4 aren't at the library yet so I will have to wait to see what the new characters that show up in the next series are like.

Little Giant 1946

Little Giant is the 14th movie that Abbott and Costello made for Universal Pictures and their first in 1946. It's written by Walter Deleon, Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins. The director is William A Seiter. The Wikipedia says he was paid $100,000 and the stars got $110,000 each. The boys were on the outs at the time they were filming the movie and they created parts for them that didn't really have them interacting with each other.

Lou plays an innocent and gullible country boy who take a correspondence school class on salesmanship. He goes to work for a man named John Morrison, played by Bud, at the Hercules Vacuum Cleaner Company. Things don't go well and Lou gets fired the first day. Lou's Uncle Clarence, the company bookkeeper, sends Lou to the Stockton branch to work for Bud's cousin Tom Chandler, who's also played by Bud. In fact, Bud has a third role, playing the two cousin's grandmother. In Stockton the other salesmen trick Bud into thinking that he can read minds and he becomes the best salesman.

There's a subplot about Morrison being a dirty guy who's cooked the books. Bud returns to Los Angeles HQ as the leading salesman and Morrison thinks he knows about the fiddling going on. Morrison gets worried and he sends his wife to see what Lou knows. Turns out it was nothing, the pair dope themselves and pass out on the couch. Bud returns home to Cucamonga after he hears Morrison bad mouthing him only to find the president of the company waiting for him. He gives Lou the sales manager job for Cucamonga. Nice for Bud, huh. It's a nice little movie with some good jokes and funny bits. That's half way though the set, only 14 more to go. 

Science Fiction Sunday 360

Caltiki - The Immortal Monster is a 1959 Italian movie set in Mexico. An archeologist returns to camp, he's all screwed up and needs some medical attention. They wonder where his partner is and set out to the ruins to look for him. They find a cave with a giant statue of Caltiki and a deep pool of water. In the water they find a treasure of gold. The diver's second dive proves fatal as the blob monster makes an appearance. The party escapes but one man has some blob on his arm. The blob monster is destroyed by fire and the group returns to Mexico City. Doctors remove the bit of blob from the man's arm and scientists discover radiation makes it grow. A radioactive comet happens by and the blob grows and attacks. The man who got the blob on his arm goes nuts and kills some women before he's digested by the newly formed blob. There's a lot of reacting to so-so effects which are typical of the time. Lucky it's a short movie, only 75 minutes, and it's over quickly. Riccardo Freda is credited as the director, under the name Robert Hamton in the US version, but the Wikipedia says that an uncredited Mario Bava also directed. This is before his first credited feature Black Sunday. The version on YouTube in the link in the title is watchable but a bit fuzzy. It's not worth watching unless you're like me and want to see all the monster movies there are.

Amphibian Man is a 1962 Russian film that's set in Argentina but filmed in Baku Azerbaijan. There's trouble with the pearl divers, a strange monster has been terrorizing the divers, their boss is a mean dick who doesn't believe them until the creature rescues the woman he wants to marry from a shark. The woman doesn't want to marry him but her father is forcing her to do it so he can be rich too. The boss wants to capture the sea creature, which turns out to be a human with shark gills, and eventually he does. The scientist who created the sea creature wants to lead the human race into the water to escape their oppressive masters. He has a cool underground cave with a giant window to the sea. There's a bit of romance between the daughter and the sea creature but that ends sadly. I hadn't heard of it before but I thought I'd take a chance and it turned out to be a more interesting film than the first one I watched. It's well made and the copy on YouTube looks pretty good. I'd recommend it.

Friday Night Movies 551

 

El Monstro Del Mar! is a 2010 Australian film that was written and directed by Stuart Simpson. It's not got any actors in it that I know. What I do know is the people he hired to act in the film aren't quite so good at their jobs as the people behind the camera are. The story is simple, some bimbo killers are on the run, they hide out in a seaside town, there's drinking and loud music, then the monster happens. Other reviews comment on the opening of the film as being an homage to Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! I can see that, it's shot in black & white and there are three women in a car. I'm not a big fan of FPKK and I've never grown into a Meyer's fan so that homage means little to me. I've seen a few of his films over the years and never re-watched them. 

The only other residents of the seaside town are a young woman and her wheelchair bound grandfather. They live in the house next door. He tells the trashy women to stay out of the water but they make fun of him. The noise and the splashing attract a giant multi-tentacle monster from the depths of the ocean and the few people that are active in the area are getting chomped up pretty quickly. Eventually the monster makes a full on play for the last of the cast holed up in Grandpa's house. It wrecks the place, takes a beating when the girls fight back, and runs off into the depths to lick it's wounds for the sequel. The nice girl, gramps and the leader of the trio of killers survive. The bimbo promises to return with some friends to finish off the monster. So far that hasn't happened.

Sadly it's not really very good. It's slow at first, there are no monsters for quite a while and much of the movie is tinted a sickening green color. The trailer seems to have less green tint so I am guessing that the copy that was uploaded to Amazon Prime might be the problem. Not something I need to watch again and I won't be looking to add the DVD to my collection.

I feel the same about our next feature, Cop Car, though it's a better movie. Kevin Bacon stars in, and produces, the 2015 film directed by Jon Watts. This is Watt's second movie, he directed Clown last year and some segments of Onion News Network. He's working on the latest Spider-Man reboot for 2017. Christopher Ford and Watts wrote the script which is about a couple of dumb kids who are running away from home. They steal a cop car and that opens a can of worms that they weren't expecting.

Kevin is the sheriff and he'd left the car in the woods so he could dump a body. We will soon learn he's a crooked cop with some ties to the drug business. He's not a clever guy but he sure works hard trying to cover his ass before the boys are found in his car and the jig is up.

The kids, Travis and Harrison find all the guns in the car but they can't figure out how to turn off the safety's. They hear a noise in the trunk and wow, there's guy tied up in there. They release Man, as he's called in the script, who locks them into the backseat of the car. He has them call Kevin for help. Kevin desperately wants the car and he comes running. Man hides nearby with rifle and waits for Kevin. Camryn Manheim wonders into the scene and takes a bullet in the head for helping the police. The sheriff and Man are shot, we never find out if the latter is dead but Kevin is still alive. Travis gets shot with a ricochet as Harrison fires the pistol into the back door window frame trying to break the glass. He gets the window on the second shot and  drives the car to town to a hospital. The sheriff follows but gets taken out by a cow in the road. The boys had left a pasture gate open earlier and the cow must have wandered into the road. Poor Beefy. It's ambiguous if Travis survives his joy ride. It's a well made movie, good action , well acted but kind of sad. It would be a good movie to show kids, good lessons to be learned.

We ended with a short called Harry Knuckles And The Treasure Of The Aztec Mummy off of a Troma short collection called Best Of Troma Dance Film Festival. It a 1999 short written by Ian Driscoll and Lee Demarbe. They are a team responsible for Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter and Harry Knuckles And The Pearl Necklace. I'd seen the first one, we watched it at a Friday Night Movie night back in 2009 and I didn't think much of it. This short was goofier than that. I did put the Harry Knuckles feature on my Netflix queue. The short is funny sometimes and it that might appeal to the right person. If low-budget makes-no-sense comedy is up your alley, take a look at the short in the link in the title.

Is It Bill Bailey? Series 1

The first and only series of Is It Bill Bailey? aired from February 20 to March 27 1998 on BBC Two. The title is taken from a Rizla game where someone sticks a rolling paper on your head and you have to guess the person's name on the paper. That's Bill from the opening credits a rolling paper on his forehead. Little hand written questions appear in the show's graphics that take us in and out of the different scenes.

It was a BBC Scotland production that hasn't ever been rebroadcast or put on DVD. Not sure why, the show isn't awful or anything, it made me laugh but then I like the Bill Bailey style of comedy. The TV series is a bit like his stage show, jokes and musical numbers, with filmed comedy sketches stuffed in around them. The Wikipedia says: Many songs and routines featured in the show were first performed in his Cosmic Jam tour and TV show Asylum and several were later used during his Bewilderness tour.

His jokes are pretty whacky but his musical numbers are the best. His 60s Belgian Jazz version of the Doctor Who theme was totally entertaining and right up my street. He parody's the music of some pop stars and there are 3 or 4 bits with Cockney music that I thought were pretty silly and worth seeing for the music, or cockney, fan. There's no doubt that Bill is a talented musician who like injecting comedy into the music. He's the Victor Borge of his day.

Bill wrote much of the show with help from Sean Lock, who's listed as the Script Editor, and Martin Trenaman. Joining Bill in the sketches, a lot of which were filmed outside, are Simon Pegg, Geraldine McNulty, Forbes Mason, Norman Lovett (briefly in one episode) and several other people I wasn't familiar with. The director of the 6 episodes was Edgar Wright. You might recognize some of his later work, Spaced, Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz. Those are all worth having in your video collection but I'm not sold on Scott Pilgrim Vs The World and I'm flip flopping on The World's End.

I watched them all in one go and enjoyed the bunch of them. You can see the whole series on YouTube, there's a link up in the title at the top of the post. The quality of the video's is fairly good for something taken from a VHS tape.

Val Lewton - Cat People 1942

Val Lewton produced a bunch of great pictures for RKO in the 1940s and they've packaged the 9 horror films into a 5 disc set. Val had a short career in films, he started in 1932 and worked until he passed away in 1951 at the age of 46. He was a writer and had a fairly well received novel in 1932 called No Bed Of Her Own. It was later made into a movie called No Man Of Her Own with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. Val turned to screen writing after his next novels failed to sell. He worked for MGM until he got the job as head of horror at RKO in 1942. RKO wanted the horror films he made to cost less than $150,000, run under 75 minutes, and they would supply the titles. His first film, Cat People, would cost $134,000 and make them $4 million over the first two years of release. Each disc has a pair of movies and the first disc has Cat People and it's sequel The Curse Of The Cat People.

Cat People premiered in New York on December 6 1942 and came out in the rest of the country on Christmas day that year. It had a script by DeWitt Bodeen who would write The Curse Of The Cat People and The Seventh Victim for Lewton a few years later. DeWitt also wrote The Enchanted Cottage, I Remember Mama, 12 To The Moon and Billy Budd and many TV episodes in the 1950s. The screenplay was based on Val Lewton's short story The Bagheeta which was published in 1930. Jacques Tourneur was the director and he's made a nice number of good films like Nightfall and Night Of The Demons. For Val he also directed I Walked With A Zombie and The Leopard Man. I've seen most of those films once and Cat People 4 or 5 times.  

There's a good cast with Simone Simon as Irena Dubrovna Reed, Kent Smith as Oliver Reed, Tom Conway as Dr. Louis Judd, Jane Randolph as Alice Moore, Jack Holt as The Commodore, Elizabeth Russell as the cat like Serbian woman in a restaurant, and Alan Napier as Doc Carver. That's Alice, Irene and Oliver in the picture above.

At the heart of the picture is a love triangle which is complicated by Irena's belief that she is descended from a race of Serbians that turn into panthers when sexually aroused. She marries Oliver but won't sleep with him, fearing that she'll kill him when she's a cat. He tries to understand but he doesn't really believe that she could actually turn into a panther. He asks her to see a psychiatrist named Dr Judd who tells her it's all in her head. Alice and Doc work with Oliver who's a ship designer for the Commodore. Alice is in love with Oliver and she makes no secret of it. Irena doesn't care for Alice much, she scares her a couple of times in some moody and well done scenes.

Sadly things don't go so well for Irena. It's a bit sad at the end but there you go, monster movies often end poorly for the innocent touched by magical maladies. It's compact, well told and well directed. It's one of Jacques' best films and quite different for the time. The monster only appears briefly and mostly near the end. The horror is found in the shadows, the shaking of tree limbs, the quickening footsteps that follow you in the darkness then stop, the isolation, fears and misunderstandings of the characters. All the elements that make up a film all come together and the end result is a film that's highly re-watchable. I watched the film and then re-ran it with the Greg Mank audio commentary. He plays a few pieces of an interview he did with Simone Simon, when she was fairly old, when appropriate. Mank's a good commentator who knows his material and he fills the time with interesting stories and details about the production. He appears on a lot of the Universal monster film DVDs. I always recommend Cat People and think people should see it.