Word: cats
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...CAT PEOPLE is a movie one doesn't forget, though it's not an unforgettable movie. It sticks out in the mind rather than impresses itself upon it--sort of like old kitty litter...
...offshoot of Val Newton's 1942 thriller of the same name. Cat People has one concern, the duality of sexuality--love versus last, innocence versus corruption, spiritual versus animal...
Irena (Natassia Kinski) is the embodiment of this duality. She is a cat person. Cat people have the peculiar tendency of transforming into black leopards when sexually aroused. They can regain human form only by killing. Only if they mate with their own kind can they avoid this dastardly B-movie fate...
...girl. She would remain a virgin, if only she could forget about that nice zookeeper (John Heard). If only he could forget about her-which should be easy, since the cheerful and lovely Annette O'Toole plays his first love. Soon Irena is switching back and forth between cat and human forms, though it must be said that her transformations are more fastidious than her brother's, which feature much smoke and bile...
...homage to the original Cat People, Schrader reproduces its two most famous scenes, in which an innocent woman (and the audience) thinks she is being stalked by the cat woman, in a park and a natatorium. The high points of the first film's terror, they seem pale and out of place in this gaudy but insecure film, which is all flesh and flash, never truly passionate or frightening. These sequences, in this context, become tributes not so much to a nostalgically recalled genre piece, but to the movies' long since vanished powers of suggestion. In those days...