SCREAM AND STREAM AGAIN: THE BLACK CAT (1989) ***

(Streamed via YouTube)

Directed by Luigi Cozzi (who also served as one of the many uncredited directors in yesterday’s movie, Vampires in Venice), The Black Cat originally began life as the proposed final installment of Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy.  Once he left the project, Cozzi got ahold of the script, rewrote it, and turned the Three Mothers movie into a prospective film-within-a-film.  The Argento connection doesn’t end there because in some territories, it was sold as a sequel to the Argento-produced Demons.  (Part 6, to be exact.)  If you squint hard enough, you can see the connection, thanks to the abundance of heavy metal on the soundtrack and the participation of that film’s star, Urbano Barberini. 

Anne (Florence Guerin) is an actress starring in an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat.  Her husband, Marc (Barberini) is a director who just got hired to make the final sequel in The Three Mothers Trilogy, and he wants Anne to star as the witch, Levana.  Almost immediately, Anne starts having dreams and visions of the real Levana terrorizing her. 

Things only get weirder from there.

The Black Cat almost feels like a precursor to New Nightmare as it’s about an actress who is haunted by a character in her latest movie.  I think Cozzi was going for an Argento vibe with the use of vibrant colors during the nightmare scenes, but it winds up feeling more like a late-‘80s Elm Street sequel (especially The Dream Child), which isn’t a bad thing.  I mean Levana even has a disfigured face and razor-sharp fingernails!  Like New Nightmare, there are also some in-jokes that are amusing, like the screenwriter having a Godzilla costume in his office.  (Cozzi directed an Italian version of Godzilla in the ‘70s.) 

In terms of “quality”, the pendulum fluctuates all over the place.  It is, however, rarely boring.  Often times, it feels as if Cozzi put a mess of movies in a blender, hit the “Puree” button, and made a cinematic smoothie.  In addition to the Argento homages, we have characters spewing green vomit like The Exorcist, and a scene where guts shoot out of a TV just like in Videodrome.  Heck, Cozzi even rips off himself a couple times.  There’s a bonkers scene where a woman’s heart explodes out of her chest that looks suspiciously like leftover props from Cozzi’s Contamination, and there are lots of random cutaways to a shoddy looking starfield that look like outtakes from Cozzi’s Starcrash.

Speaking of Starcrash, that film’s star, Caroline Munro appears in a supporting role as a sexpot actress; and she’s looking quite foxy, I might add.  Brett (The Devil’s Honey) Halsey also has a brief, but memorable turn as a cranky wheelchair-bound producer.  The stars, on the other hand, are about as dull as dishwater, but that doesn’t really matter when the movie itself is so batshit insane.

I’m not saying any of this makes sense.  I’m not saying any of this is what you would call “good”.  What I am saying is that it’s fucking nuts, and for some (READ:  Me), that will be enough.

AKA:  Demons 6.  AKA:  Dead Eyes.