Word: schrader
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...Kinski, emulating her success in Tess, gives an admirable performance. Though the sexual theme holds great potential for creating vivid, powerful characters, Irena could be played by a stuffed animal. The audience, primed with Cinderella fairytales and pubescent fantasies, already knows Irena's conflict. And so director Paul Schrader (American Gigolo, Hardcore. Blue Collar) uses his characters as no more than props...
McDowell's performance as the brother comes closest to avoiding sterile characterization. A minister of a Pentecostal sect. Paul has struggled desperately to overcome his affliction through religious faith. But Schrader gives only a taste of Paul's struggle and abruptly throws the focus back to Irena...
While the characters are shallow, everything else reeks of over-kill. The sex scenes are unnecessarily explicit, and Schrader revels in giving us the gamut on perversion from bestiality and incest to kink and sado-masochism. Schrader also isn't much interested in generating suspense. When Irena suddenly wanders through a surreal Cajun bayou, the audience is too confused to be worried. Occasionally Schrader resorts to the cheap device of startling the viewer--something appears suddenly or moves when it shouldn't. All in all, Cat People is as imaginative as coitus interruptus--and about as subtle...
...Schrader aspires to nothing and succeeds masterfully. From his subconscious has come a movie that reflects the pubescence of a society whose view of sex is about as spiritual as a strawberry-flavored douche. Cat People is a reaction, a burp caused by the sexual junkfood of Hugh Hefner, erotic bakeries, and crotchless underwear. And, like belching, it provides relief though one feels obliged to say, "Excuse...
...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...