This is one of those things that you start watching because it's on Netflix and you're too sleep deprived to realize it's a terrible idea. I mean, apart from Nastassja Kinski being really pretty, this film has absolutely nothing to recommend it. It doesn't even have a good soundtrack, despite Bowie singing the theme song. I'm a pretty big fan of Malcolm McDowell and his impressive talent for being able to make a movie scary just by looking at the camera, but even he couldn't do anything much with this part. I honestly couldn't tell you why I watched the entire thing. In retrospect I would have been better off sitting through The Hunger again... I'd hoped to enjoy the plentiful footage of great wild cats in the New Orleans Zoo, the film's main setting, but their horrible cement enclosures inspired much more in the way off horror than anything else about this so-called horror film did. I'd also hoped for the sort of colourful campiness so common in sort-of-horror films made throughout the decade, but what I ended up getting was an upsettingly prurient male power fantasy. Ugh.
Recommendation: don't waste your time on this shameful example of WTF Cinema (unless you really, really want to see Ms. Kinski get naked for no reason and kill a little bunny rabbit with her teeth, which is nowhere near as sexy as it sounds); hunt down a copy of the original and much classier Cat People film, made in 1942 and starring the inimitable Simone Simon.
This one's been on my watch list for years, and, laid up with a nasty cold and lured by the promise of vampire David Bowie, lesbian Catherine Deneuve, and Bauhaus, I watched it. Poor, misguided me.
It starts off alright, with a vaguely creepy club scene involving a very brief appearance by the promised Bauhaus (inevitably performing Bela Lugosi's Dead, of course). From there it's all downhill...
First Bowie, who's not really a vampire (more of a bloodsucking groupie, really) shrivels up into an ancient zombie-thing, kills an annoying teenybopper, and then - flakes - away. Then Susan Sarandon (ecch) gets naked for no good reason at all (double ecch). Catherine Deneuve doesn't really get naked at all, which is quite disappointing. Everyone acts like a jerk and then dies, except for Catherine Deneuve, who shrivels up into a witchy old thing and gets locked in a box forever and ever, and Susan Sarandon, who takes over as head slutty vampire (ecch x eternity).
