Interesteg What makes it different from others?

Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Married Baby Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Man99204 I actually enjoyed this film ore than the much more famous Cat People.This film is worth watching for a number of different reasons.Most people watch this film because of Simone Simone. And while I am a major fan of Simone, this is not one of her better films. She has what amounts to a cameo - as few scenes in which she plays the ghost of Irena - the character from the Cat People film.The central character is actually child actress Ann Carter. She is absolutely mesmerizing in the role of a lonely child. Sadly, she made few films before becoming struck down by polio. It is amazing what can be done with a tiny budget - and a great amount of imagination. For a film buff, the fact that this is the first film directed by Robert Wise, makes it worth watching. He has an adept hand at directing even at this very early stage in his career.

James Hitchcock "The Curse of the Cat People" is, officially, a sequel to "Cat People" from two years earlier. The two films had the same producer, Val Lewton, and the same scriptwriter, DeWitt Bodeen, although they had different directors. (Robert Wise, later to become famous for films like "West Side Story" and "The Sound of Music", earned his first directing credit by completing the film after the original director, Gunther von Fritsch, was sacked for working too slowly). They starred the same three actors, Kent Smith, Simone Simon and Jane Randolph, in the same roles. And yet the two films are quite different in tone and style, so different that they could be described as belonging to separate genres. "Cat People" is a horror movie, albeit far more subtle and restrained than many films which go by that description today, whereas "The Curse of the Cat People" can best be described as a supernatural fantasy. The action takes place several years after the events narrated in "Cat People". That film's hero Oliver Reed- a name which was later to be made famous by an actor- is now married to Alice, and they have a six-year- old daughter, Amy. Amy is a strange child, intelligent and imaginative but shy, withdrawn and introverted, and her parents, especially Oliver, are worried because she spends so much time daydreaming and she finds it difficult to make friends at school. Oliver's worries are rooted in his sad memories of his first wife Irena who he believes went mad because of an over-active imagination, culminating in her suicide. (Those who have seen "Cat People" will realise that the reasons for Irena's death were more complex than that, but Oliver has never accepted the truth about his first wife).Amy does, however, make two friends. One is Julia Farren, an elderly, reclusive and half-mad former actress who lives in a big house in the village with only her daughter Barbara for company. Julia, however, is under the delusion that Barbara died many years ago and that the woman living with her is an impostor pretending to be her daughter. The strain of caring for her impossible mother is slowly driving Barbara mad herself, and she conceives an irrational hatred of young Amy. Amy's other friend is none other than the deceased Irena, who appears to her as a ghost. Some have interpreted the ghostly Irena as a mere figment of Amy's imagination, although I don't think that this interpretation really works. Supernatural fantasies, often involving ghosts, were popular in the forties; examples include (from America) "The Ghost and Mrs Muir", "Portrait of Jennie", "I Married a Witch", "It's a Wonderful Life" and (from Britain) "Blithe Spirit" and "A Matter of Life and Death". Perhaps the war had had the effect of turning people's thoughts towards the afterlife. "The Curse of the Cat People" is another film in this tradition, and I think that we are supposed to accept that Irena really has returned from the grave to watch over the daughter of her one-time husband. Lewton, in fact, did not like the film's title and wanted to change it to "Amy and Her Friend" to emphasise the differences in tone between this film and its predecessor. The studio (RKO), however, insisted on keeping the phrase "cat people" in the title to cash in on the success of the previous film. Their marketing strategy, using slogans like "The Beast Woman Stalks the Night Anew", also suggested, wrongly, that this was a horror film like the first. Yet in some ways their choice of title was an appropriate one. Irena, a sinister, threatening character in the earlier film, here becomes a benevolent one, the implication being that the curse which afflicted her in life has been lifted in death and that she now has the chance to atone for the evil she once caused by acting as Amy's guardian spirit. Simone Simon, so effective as the menacing, feline Irena of the first film, has to call on very different acting skills here. The lovely Simone, despite her beauty and obvious talent, never really became a big-name star, possibly because she never seemed able to decide whether she was happier working in America or in her native France. It is perhaps significant that the name Irena, a variant of Irene, derives from "eirene", the Greek for "peace". The film ends on a note of serenity and reconciliation with the breach between Amy and her parents healed through Irena's agency. Despite its low budget and the change of directors halfway through, "The Curse of the Cat People" achieves the rare feat, for a sequel, of being not only as good as the original film but also completely different from it. 8/10

gavin6942 This mostly unrelated sequel to "Cat People" (1942) has Amy, the young daughter of Oliver and Alice Reed. Amy is a very imaginative child who has trouble differentiating fantasy from reality, and has no friends her own age as a result.The most notable thing about this film is that it was Robert Wise's directorial debut. This also happens to be produced by Val Lewton and the key cast members reprise their roles, so it is not exactly the "mostly unrelated" sequel the plot says above (though the film does go in a radically different direction than the original and the cat aspects are played down).Also, I love the child slap! This girl may be lonely and in need of a friend, but she sure knows how to slap a kid hard in the face.

leoperu Many a reviewer is raving about this Gothic-spiced lyrical melodrama masked as a horror by its nonsensical title. A unique portrait of child's soul, some say. In my opinion, the movie (as well as other Lewton's "horrors") surely has its strengths (above all Musuraca's b+w photography), but cannot be lauded as a masterpiece. One should bear in mind that - not mentioning fiction,i.e. stories by Henry James, Géza Csáth and others - within the same decade genuine cinematic jewels emerged in Europe, such as "The Fallen Idol" (1948) or "Les jeux interdits" (1952). THESE were adult films dealing with child psycho(patho)logy, not Lewton's fairy tale overloaded with ambitions but also simplistic and clichéd, reflecting the theme in the mirror of Hollywood's emblematic immaturity. I can hardly believe that "The Curse of the Cat People" became "a gold mine" for Reed and Clément, nor, as "CINEPASSION" puts it, later for Erice and Saura. Yet you never know.As for the image, the R2 German edition (lacking extras) is even better than the R1 Warner disc.