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.
For some reason known only to herself (in her defense, I think it had to do with our curiosity regarding the local film industry), my kid sister bought this on DVD as a Crimbomas gift for the whole family. And what a family film it is...
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...What am I talking about?! It's totally not a family film. Unless you're raising your family on a steady diet of the Sams (Peckinpah & Raimi, obviously), in which case your kids will have a healthy appreciation for the respectable volume of red paint splashed all over the streets of F*ck Town. And if you're not filling your offspring's little heads with such sensational stuff, what the hell is wrong with you? I can tell you that my own childhood would have been vastly improved by the Evil Dead films, and I hope that you'll learn from my parents' mistakes and make sure your kids don't grow up deprived and turn out like me [insert wry and slightly disturbing wink here].
But I digress. Conclusion: this film is amusing, if not for the faint of heart (or people who dislike the colour red). If you enjoy razor-blade-encrusted baseball bats, hockey skates, Rutger Hauer, hobos, and electric toasters, this prime example of good clean Canadian fun is not to be missed.
Recommendation for getting absolutely the most out of this gleefully grisly gorefest: watch it with your mom.
