After a while, all of Lucio Fulci's films begin to blend together into an incoherent mush. They all have the same elements: extended gore and sex sequences, slow scenes of painful expository dialogue, poorly defined characters, and a vague, metaphysical malaise that settles on top of the whole mess. In The Black Cat we have a film supposedly based on a story of the same name by Edgar Allen Poe. I say "supposedly" because I don't think that Poe ever wrote something this ridiculous. In this film, a small village is beset by a chain of violent murders which are carried out by none other than regular black housecats. Of course, they're not just housecats...they have been possessed by a local psychic to do his bidding. Why is he doing this? What is the source of his power? How are these villagers so laughably kill-able? These questions are never answered. Amazingly, I can't recall the name of a single character in this film. It's all just a long chain of murders, talking, and close-ups of black cats. I doubt very seriously that this movie was what Poe had in mind when he first wrote The Black Cat.
5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment