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Cat O'Nine Tails
[Simitar Entertainment]
1971; color
Directed by Dario Argento
Starring: Karl Malden, James Franciscus, Catherine Spaak, Pier Paolo Capponi, Horst Frank, Rada Rassimov & Aldo Reggiani
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As mentioned previously (either somewhere on this site on in a recent c14 column), in the wake of my love affair with the DVD release of Suspiria, I've been slowly working my way through the Dario Argento filmography. According to the version of said filmography available on the IMDB (which is often wrong, although I'm almost positive they're right about this) Cat O'Nine Tails is his second directorial outing, following the totally memorable The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. In retrospect I'm glad I didn't start my Argento education with this one, because it's not as memorable. Which is not to say it's a bad movie, per se; it's just that it's a little lacking in all of the things one may come to expect from an Argento movie based on his more famous films. Particularly it just doesn't have the "look" of his more well known works but, in all fairness, portions of it may look crappy and way too dark thanks to the fact that I did not rent this on DVD, but instead watched the dusty VHS copy the Kommandant picked up at a flea market sometime last summer. The story isn't all that unusual for this type of film, involving the standard array of main characters, at least two or three of which are attractive women, all of whom seem as if they have plenty of skeletons in their closet (well, except for the little girl; what kind of trouble could she really have gotten herself into at that age... although there is something particularly odd and Lolita-esque about the fact that her "guardian" is her "blind" "uncle"); a slew of secondary characters who only exist to be potential victims or red herrings; and, of course, the prerequisite black gloved killer. Although the black gloved killer doesn't set the chain of events into motion, that credit goes to the liberation of a mysterious item that will remain somewhat mysterious for most of the movie from a local genetics laboratory. That's how it goes though, the black gloved killer always comes along to avenge a something and, in this case, it's linked to whatever was ripped off from the lab. I can't tell you what it is, obviously. Any more than I can tell you who the killer is. Then you would have absolutely no reason to watch it. (If you do decide to watch it, I think you should try to rent the Blue Underground version. I'm sure it doesn't shake and wobble as much as the one I watched.) However I can tell you the blind guy is played by Karl Malden, the suave reporter dude is played by James Franciscus and the soundtrack is by multiple Argento collaborator Ennio Morricone. Cat O'Nine Tails isn't near as groundbreaking as some of his other movies but still worth a look.
—Bunny
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