As innocent Diana tries to open the wooden crate that holds the new pet, secretly psychotic Lou warns, “Don’t open it. It’s Pandora’s Box. Come to punish you, torture us with all the evils of humanity.” He forgets to warn the audience of the evils of sitting through scratched-up filmstock. The ancient Greek myth that Hesiod was so tempted to open the mythical box left to her husband, that when she opened it, this curiosity of mythology released curses upon all mankind. As we sit through the frisky (and hiss-toric) tuxedo kitty kat classic The Black Cat, it seems as if what was wrought out of this box was not boils, diseases, and depression but bad cinematic exploits such as this (curse you film gods and the equines you rode in on). As a teacher it can be very alarming when students feel they cannot read the works of Mr. Poe, because the solid lump in the litter box is most of his stories are only three pages long (take a Tylenol for the massive headache these pages develop), so what gives anyone an even bigger headache is how filmmakers keep stretching these (tails) into feature-length purr-ty pictures (and stretch is an extremely loose word here).
It seems as if director Harold Hoffman (in which this film seems to be the only scratch on his knoll post) said, “For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to film, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect this story to stretch deeper than an hour, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream it to be a longer cinematic experience.” Although there have been several adaptations of Poe’s bibliography, including the famous AIP/Roger Corman/Vincent Price collaborations, the story of “The Black Cat” is the true lion king of being the most adapted of his oeuvre, with more than twenty stage, radio, and film renditions and counting. Of the many, the best might be Stuart Gordon’s (Re-animator) Masters of Horror episode starring Jeffery Combs, yet to say Hoffman and company did the worst is not fair. It’s short, has little emotional drive, and does so much “Rock Climbing” you would swear it is set in the Rocky Mountains, but taking on a French New Wave approach to the cinematography by Walter Schenk (who shot the Russ Meyer classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) while remaining closely faithful to the short story makes you fur-get the faults in its cheap budget and monotonous excuse to fill time filming the cat lick itself (talk about having a bad taste leaving the theatre). You don’t have to paw through too many film theory textbooks to hear praise of Edgar G. Ulmer’s (not faithful) pre-Hays Code pseudo-sexual version starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. I feel this hairball fails to live up to the story, where Hoffman’s succeeds. You only have to watch modern tellings of the works of maestro Stephen King to understand you can only stretch a story so thin before it breaks (see the Children of the Corn sequels or The Lawnmower Man… actually, strike that. DO NOT watch any of these). It’s not a bad film overall, just short in execution (of the wife), but if I may use Poe himself to speak my feelings of this film, “Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy” (the cat certainly didn’t get his tongue).
Poor Lou (Who’s Lou?). In an area where the focus on mental health took a back seat to the appearance of solidarity, he finds it hard to focus, and his thoughts betray him. Although he has everything one could ask for—he has a large automobile, with a beautiful house, and a beautiful wife ( and you may say to yourself ‘MY GOD! Why am I watching this’)—it’s never enough and he becomes obsessed with the idea of killing his wife, and the mangy cat she brought into his home! He tries his best to work with his psychologist, but there is something evil lurking in the depths of his soul, and it isn’t the thing with whiskers. Though Diana does her best to understand, and even leaves after he does his best to kill her after a wild night at a dance club (that band, though, is the cat’s meow!), she comes back, because true love can never be sealed behind the wall (or can it?). Will Lou be able to curtail his devious behavior, or will the police have to build a murder case, brick by brick?
Pawing your way at seventy-three minutes, Hoffman never directed again, but did go on to write screenplays for the films In The Year 2889 and Sex and the Animals (maybe he took the kitten stuff a little too seriously). You can snuggle on the back of the couch and watch this on streamers like Tubi and YouTube, but try to sift through the litter boxes of flea (there are collars for these) markets to find a copy of the OOP Double feature of this and The Fat Black Pussy-Cat from Something Weird Video. So remember – there is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brutish bad movie, which goes directly to the heart of film lovers who frequent occasions to test the paltry fidelity of cinematic quality and tastes!
