In the most faithful adaptation of The Black Cat ever made, some filmmakers who are making a film version of The Black Cat in the opening scene (but then it's never mentioned again), decide that they want to make a horror movie based on the same made-up witch mythology as Dario Argento's Suspiria and Inferno. The director asks his actress wife to play the lead role of the evil witch Levana, but it turns out that Levana really exists and doesn't cotton to having someone play her in a shitty Italian horror movie.
Luigi Cozzi's The Black Cat was on my radar because a description I read online made it sound like it was an unofficial attempt to make a final installment in Dario Argento's (then unfinished) "Three Mothers" trilogy. So you can imagine my surprise when the full, on-screen title was Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat. Ugh. I love Poe to death, but I swear that "The Black Cat" has been adapted to film more than any other story in the history of literature. (Here are just two versions that I've written about on this blog). I'm getting kind of sick of it. Turns out though, this one really has next to nothing to do with Poe's story or Argento's films. It's just kind of a dull supernatural horror movie with some not-as-clever-as-it-thinks-it-is meta elements, some lame showbiz satire, and a fair amount of accidental comedy. There are enough laughs in this one (like when a character dies and comes back as a supernatural force, exclaiming "That's right, Sarah, I can control time now!") that I don't regret watching it, but even though it caters to some of my guilty pleasures (like really gaudy lighting involving bold primary colors), I'm not going to pretend for a second that this is a good movie. This isn't like the real Demons, where the bad stuff is funny but the good stuff is genuinely good... this is just all bad.
Grade: C-
1 comment:
"That's right Sarah, I can control time now."
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