I know this is not exactly appropriate for Wednesday of Holy Week, but I'm going to go ahead and write about these while they're still fresh on my mind, having watched the second of them last night. My wife and I watch a lot of movies together, but she's not necessarily interested in some of the same stuff I am, so I've been using Tuesday nights, when she's "attending" an online class, as a convenient time to watch some of those.
Cat People is considered a "horror" classic of the '40s. I put that in quotes because there isn't any actual violence, blood, and gore in it–"supernatural suspense" would be a better description. I thought it might be fun in a campy or so-bad-it's-good sort of way, but it's considerably better than I expected. I wouldn't recommend it strongly unless you just like this sort of thing, but it does create an atmosphere very successfully, and the story has substance. It has an interesting philosophical dimension: the cat woman (of course it's a woman) is descended from Serbian witches who turn into panthers under the influence of strong emotion, especially negative emotion. She deeply wishes for this not to happen, but nobody takes her seriously, and she's treated as having a psychological problem. And her efforts to avoid the transformation have the unintended effect of helping to bring it on. The psychiatrist who attempts to treat her is a Man of Science who thinks he can explain everything in material terms, and I don't think I'll be giving away too much if I say that effort doesn't end well.
So, that was last Tuesday. And I had no reason to think that the other movie on the DVD, Curse of the Cat People, would be anything but a silly sequel intended to capitalize on the success of the first (which was a huge hit, apparently) by repeating more or less the same story. So I intended to send the DVD back to Netflix without watching the second movie, but for some reason I kept thinking well, maybe I'll just check out the first ten minutes or so, and putting off sending it back, and pretty soon it was Tuesday night again and I decided to give it a try.
I'm really glad I did. This must be the most misleadingly named movie of all time. It has nothing to do with cat people per se, except that the character who was the cat woman in the first movie is involved, and it has nothing to do with a curse–if "cat people" had to be in the title, Blessing of the Cat People would have been more accurate. It is a sequel of sorts to the first movie, but is very, very different. It's not remotely a horror movie, even by 1940s standards, but rather, a sort of ghost story, a lovely and lyrical ghost story about a lonely little girl. It actually gave me more chills than Cat People, but those were produced by very skillful direction, not by anything sensationalistic. It's about loneliness and misunderstanding and love and redemption, and I do recommend it. My only reservation is that it ends a bit abruptly, not wrapping up a couple of things that I thought were important. (Well, and much of the acting in both is less than great, but it's ok.) You really would need to watch the first one first, though, as there are some things in the second that wouldn't entirely make sense without it.
Light On Dark Water 
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