The Black Cat Review

Review of THE BLACK CAT (1989) by screenqueeen: 👍 4/5

Despite being called Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat," this is largely unrelated to the actual story unless you count the movie being made within THE BLACK CAT, titled "THE BLACK CAT" and even then the relation to the original story is infinitesimal at best. But this used as a strength for the film.

Anne, an actor on "THE BLACK CAT" goes home with her husband, a director working on a different film based on the Mother of Tears, Levana, pulling from Argento's SUSPIRIA for inspiration. You can tell the characters and Cozzi are all infatuated with the movie, each time it's mentioned Goblin's score becomes quoted/paraphrased within CAT's existing original underscore.

Things get a little complex once they deal with producer Levin, someone who could make or break their movie. The treatment they deliver has a page count of 4, which Levin raves about, thus lifting a stack of scripts and other stuff, yelling about all the other crap he gets sent that will never see the light of day and chucks it against the floor. Given how meta this already is I was half-expecting a movie titled DEMONS 6 be among that pile.

I think Cozzi really outdoes himself with this by making it a celebration of Italian horror. He gets a nice Bava nod at the beginning, then Bava Jr. with the use of recorded medium as performance art (beyond moviemaking, those cutaways to TV screens are sublime), wrapped in Fulci-like mysticism and predates CAT IN THE BRAIN by a year, where he would play himself as director of notoriously gross horror films.

There's a lot to love here. This movie fucking rules, I tell you what.