******
- Verified Buyer
This is a very-very stylish atmospheric suspense filled movie that could have used a huge injection of HORROR. As is, it's a mystery of sorts, dealing with strange deaths in a quaint English village, each one aided and abetted by an evil black cat. The story is "freely adapted" from a tale by Edgar Allan Poe. The camera is often in stalker-mode, at times sweeping along the ground at a cat's eye view. The acting is fairly decent (especially Patrick Magee as the morbid professor Robert Miles who purports to be a medium given to collecting tape recordings of the recently deceased). Once the unexplained deaths catch the attention of Scotland Yard, they send an Inspector (David Warbeck) to investigate. He turns to a photographer (Mimsy Farmer) to take the crime photos. She sees evidence that a cat was involved and since there's only one cat in the neighborhood............Most of the film involves set pieces, gruesome deaths, a suffocating sense of mystique. There are also an inordinate number of eyeball shots, close enough to see the whites of everyone's eyes. They are not used sparingly. While this might seem to indicate a certain amount of tension on everyone's part, after a while, the sheer number of close-ups proves more comical than sinister. But I did like the eyeball to eyeball shot of two people conversing through an opening in a gate. Very stylish, pity there wasn't more substance.Cool and creepy, but it should have been more intense considering the subject matter. Even so, loved it.
