I think this movie deserves better than it’s 5.8 rating on IMDB. It isn’t great art, but defintely worth watching. Reviewers say it isn’t as “good” as it’s namesake from 1942, but Schrader said he never intended it as a remake of Val Newton’s film.
It goes without saying that Nastassja looks great…not to mention Annette O’Toole. I really like the atmospheric score, interesting New Orleans locations and terrific cinematography.
Besides, where else can you see Ed Begley’s arm get ripped off by a jaguar?
Annette O’Toole was such a stunning redhead. Cat People is her best movie role. I’m surprised that she didn’t have a bigger movie career. She’s done a lot of tv (Nash Bridges, Smallville).
The swimming pool scene with Annette is very good. Nothing like being stalked when you’re alone in the pool.
I saw this on cable as a teenager and loved Annette at first sight. I just recently saw her again when she came onstage to do a song with her husband, Michael McKean, on the Unwigged and Unplugged tour. She still looks just as stunning at 58!
An interesting film – I saw it when it first came out, and read the lengthy Cinefantastique article on it at the time. It seems to me a confused tangle of a story, with some good effects work and a not very satisfying plot – what there was of it. Schrader might not have been making a remake, but he definitely wanted to evoke the earlier film --otherwise why use the same title? And he insisted on having that woman come up to Natassia and call her “Mi hermana!” as in the original, even though it doesn’t make a heluva lotta sense. And he has Ed Begley’s arm yanked off simply because there hadn’t been any blood yet.
I haven’t felt compelled to see this again since it first came out.
I still watch it every once in awhile, if for no other reason that Annette’s boobs. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but the music is great and the scerery stunning.
The woman coming up and saying “mi hermana” doesn’t make any sense? Was it supposed to? The woman approached the heroine in the original movie and said something similar. Did that make sense? I thought the whole little mystery was the point - just a little mystery.
In the early scene where he’s walking up the stairs, he moves like a cat. I don’t know, did he have some kind of dancing experience or training for this movie?
No. As I said (and you repeated), he did it because it was in the original movie – not even necessarily to add mystery. For me it didn’t add mystery, it was just annoying – suggesting something without anything to really back it up.
Re: “Mi Hermana” making any sense…well, Schrader was pretty wasted at various points while making the movie, so who knows what he was really thinking at the time?
I never really thought much of this movie except that it told me more about director Paul Schrader’s sexual quirks than I wanted to know (a suspicion that was confirmed when I read about the goings-on behind the movie in the book Easy Riders and Raging Bulls). Also, I thought the transformation sequences were rather lackluster when compared with the ones in An American Werewolf in London the year before.
And I agree with everybody who says that Annette O’ Toole was far hotter than Nastassja Kinski in this movie.
