Caseus Archivelox: The Black Cat

2002-02-26
Few films before or since have confused me as much as this one. This is entirely because of Bela Lugosi’s incredibly thick accent. It is like Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker being combined into one person, who talks with marbles in his mouth, in pig Latin, backwards, and expects the audience to be able to follow it when he reads some Judith Butler film theory. It was so distractingly hard to follow that I think I missed some of the back-story of the movie. I am not sure whether that is a bad thing or a good thing, though. Karloff was excellent, and Lugosi may have been as well, if I had been able to understand most of what he said. The major problem for the movie occurs in that, as well as with most Hollywood films, the main romantic leads are bland and the secondary characters, who are rarely given enough screen time, are much more interesting.

Also, the title “suggested by the Edgar Allen Poe story” is one of the grossest lies I have seen performed upon the American public. There was a black cat in the movie. There were no women being buried with a live cat. I was upset. I like Poe, and that movie was no Poe.

The movie was really short, but included some of the most disturbing things I have seen in a movie, let alone one that was made under the Hayes production code. Necrophilia, Satanism, a character being flayed alive, a cat being killed, incest, revenge, murder, and possibly pedophilia are all included, even if not shown on screen.

The sets were very interesting, as the art deco sets are very different from the other horror films that normally have gothic styles, with lots of stone work, although the scenes from the tunnels under the house were reminiscent of the gothic style of architecture.

The use of chess as a metaphor for the struggle between good (Lugosi) and evil (Karloff) was repeated, in my opinion more successfully, in “The Seventh Seal” so it does have an interesting place in film history beyond the first time that Karloff and Lugosi were in the same movie. However, the director, Edgar G. Ulmer, seems to have forgotten to use close-ups to break up the medium-shots that seem to dominate the film. Had he broken up the chess game for the young couple’s life, the movie would have added some much needed tension; as it is, the movie is full of great ideas, but ultimately falls short due to execution.

2002-02-26 - 9:49 p.m.
I did see "The Black Cat", and unfortunately only one cat was killed. And it was offscreen. I'm all about animals being killed on-screen. That was a major problem with "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", the cat didn't kill the bird on screen. Anyway, I found it silly, and I had problems understanding Bela Lugosi. Karloff would have been better in that role, because I could understand him. It's like Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker being combined into one person, who talks with marbles in his mouth, in pig latin, backwards, and expects the audience to be able to follow it when he reads some Judith Butler film theory. To those who don't know what I'm talking about, he was very hard to understand through his thick accent.