Popular reviews

• 

  Review by sakana1 ★★★½ 16

  Less a remake of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's Cat People than a film inspired by it, Cat Girl is deeply rooted in the same toxic social pressures that shape not only the earlier work, but also its main character.* But, whereas Cat People could be interpreted ( by me) as telling the story of a closeted lesbian and her internalized homophobia, Cat Girl is about a appropriately heterosexual, feminine woman, completely ignored by society.

  Newly married to a thoughtless, arrogant man (Jack May as Richard. They both suck.) who is already enthusiastically cheating on her, Leonora Johnson (Barbara Shelley) is called to her family's ancestral home by an uncle she hasn't seen in years. Her husband repeatedly and brusquely dismisses…

• 

  Review by Helen_S ★★★★ 6

  Not the dafty film you might think. It's as classy as its lead woman, Barbara Shelley. Stunningly beautiful film throughout, psychologically haunting and atmosphere for days.

• 

  Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★½ 1

  1st Alfred Shaughnessy

  Oh, well imagine
  As I'm pacing the pews in a church corridor
  And I can't help but to hear
  No, I can't help but to hear an exchanging of words
  What a beautiful wedding
  What a beautiful wedding, says a bridesmaid to a waiter
  And, yes, but what a shame
  What a shame the poor groom's bride is a...

  Cat?

  Now that I've got the attention of the emo demographic, let me begin by saying that going into this expecting a version of Cat People will diminish your enjoyment. Certainly, the last five minutes are very clearly a rip-off of the famed 'bus' moment in Tourneur's masterpiece, but what comes beforehand bears more of a relation to…

• 

  Review by RanchoTuVu ★★★½

  50s Goth about a woman cursed to turn into a leopard after the last person in her family leaves the curse to her. It's good looking black and white noir photography and Barbara Shelley is awesome as the Cat Girl. She goes into some cool trances in the movie and it looks great, especially her facial expressions. In the film her supernatural strength and unpredictability allows her to settle some scores while she's also a public threat and a challenge to her ex boyfriend who becomes a psychiatrist. It kind of maybe stereotypes cat instincts, but she's kind of jealous and she's got leopard strength and the film and Shelley really capture that well.

• 

  Review by kennelco ★★★½

  In Cat Girl, we have Barbara Shelley paying a visit to a long-estranged (and strange) uncle, something about a legacy. Her husband is a cad, who brings along his girlfriend and her besotted chum. Only the legacy that he hopes is financial is anything but. It’s a legacy of having a leopard familiar of sorts and a family curse of turning into a killer feline.

  “Blood on my hands made me feel strange,...excited.”

  And so she gets into it. Shelley’s old flame lives nearby, recently married though, and this situation incites no little jealousy and animal instincts. Things will not turn out well for a certain canary.

  Effectively a rip-off (*ahem* unofficial remake of Cat People), the action is moved…

• 

  Review by Nathan ★★★

  My upstairs neighbor has really loud sex at the worst times. This time it was 3 AM, and I found myself unable to fall back asleep to the jack rabbit rhythm of this fucking guy's bed posts.

  So I watched Cat Girl - an hour long Cat People knock off. All in all it was pretty decent despite my awful mood. There's also the most obvious cheating husband in any movie I have ever seen. At one point he attempts to kiss the other woman, and she backs away. "She'll see!" "Nonsense." The husband says. Cut to a wide - the husband and the woman are standing directly behind the wife in an empty bar.

  Those two will never get caught.

  Pause to slam my fist on the wall to shut up my awful neighbors, and continue viewing...

• 

  Review by Grant McLanaghan

  An atmospheric psychological horror film that repurposes RKO’s Cat People and slots it into an Old Dark House setting. Nevertheless – and despite its unoriginal, campy-sounding title – it’s pretty decent.

  Okay, it’s not of the same calibre as the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur original, but it’s a darned good knockoff. For one thing, it’s nicely directed and photographed (by Alfred Shaughnessy and Peter Hennessy respectively).

  There’s no money for special effects, which is a blessing because the idea of the eponymous character, Leonora (Barbara Shelley, in a rare leading role), suddenly waving a pair of furry paws around wouldn’t have suited the tone at all. (That said, a genuine leopard is used quite extensively (no stock footage here) and even…

• 

  Review by DopeAssGhost ★★½

  CAT GIRL (1957)
  "Leonora Johnson is a woman who returns to her ancestral home and is told she will inherit money, but also that there is a family curse: being possessed by the spirit of a leopard in spite of her disbelieving psychiatrist Dr. Brian Marlowe."
  
  Basically, it's an unofficial British-American remake of Cat People (1942) that clocks in at only barely over an hour and just feels utterly recycled!
  I mean, it's an okay little horror picture. If you haven't seen Cat People, you'll probably like this one a bit more than I did. Barbara Shelley plays the titular role and does a splendid job. There's also some lovely photography at hand and even though the big climax is…

• 

  Review by Ray ★★ 2

  Hooptober 8.8…

  “Despite all my rage, I am still just a cat in a cage…”

  So, this is just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Cat Girl and not the All Purpose Cultural kind.

  After some dark and stormy foreshadowing, we meet our presumptive cat girl and heir to the throne of Katwomandu in a pub I can only reckon is called “The Slaughtered Exposition,” because while it only runs about five minutes, it feels like thirty, and seems like a lot of front-loading for a film that runs less than 70 minutes overall. Oh, and her husband is an oversexed cad who wastes no time publicly canoodling with their friend and his (former? possibly still occasional?) lover. We’re clearly supposed to hope…

• 

  Review by Jason Drews ★★½

  “Don’t play with my emotions, Brian. I don’t think I can control them anymore.”

  In a sort-of dialogue with the immortal Cat People from 15 years earlier, this is a slight, fun genre mashup that ultimately shows how difficult peak Val Lewton is to pull off. Part cheap horror throwback/part very cheap noir, a woman is called to her uncle’s estate and told she’ll inherit the family curse—the ‘we’re cat people’ thing—when he dies, which will be very soon. She’s instructed to come alone, but instead brings her husband, his mistress (?!), and some other guy. These shitty, uninvited guests are all obnoxiously entitled and complain constantly, reminding me of the awful guests of another, better cat-themed horror film, Blacker…

• 

  Review by Joe ★★★½

  Nifty AIP Cat People riff that throws a gothic mansion and an old family curse into the mix with a dash of whatever the feline equivalent of lyncanthropy is (that's not a semantic distinction that the film itself seems to be aware of, however). Unfortunately those added elements really just act as a drag on the elegant, noirish story this finally turns into in the last third. That's where this shares the most in common with Cat People and where it becomes the most interesting as well.

• 

  Review by Luke Thorne ★★

  Alfred Shaughnessy’s British horror in which a psychiatrist (Robert Ayres) cures a young woman (Barbara Shelley) who turns into a murderer leopard due to a family spell.

  Cat Girl is an unofficial remake of Jacques Tourneur’s classic horror Cat People, which was released fifteen years earlier, and also the first of two cat movies starring Barbara Shelley, with the other being Shadow of the Cat, which was released four years later.

  As a huge fan of the original, best and classic version of Cat People, my expectations for this film were low – and they have proven to be correct.

  The story concerns Leonora Johnson (Barbara Shelley), a woman who comes back to her family home and is informed she…