‘We have a mutual understanding. I scratch their backs and they don’t scratch mine…’
There haven’t been many films about killer cats in the annals of cinematic history. This is probably because while they are evil to their very core, they are also adorable. This paradox is what makes them so cross all the time. Despite this uneasy juxtaposition, director Denis Héroux and writer Michel Parry delved into the arena of killer cats regardless with predictably dismal results…
It’s quite wonderful that The Uncanny arrived in the summer of 1977 with Peter Cushing fresh from filming a little film called Star Wars and Donald Pleasence on the verge of going off to California to shoot Halloween. The fact that those three films can even be uttered in the same sentence is sort of magical, don’t you think?
This anthology film opens with a wraparound story that sees Cushing playing a struggling writer trying to sell his book about how cats are planning on taking over the world. His publisher, played by Hollywood royalty and Hitchcock collaborator Ray Milland, is understandably reluctant to publish such a mad tome and the rest of the film sees these feline fantasies played out for our viewing pleasure. The first and best of the three tales sees a group of murderous cats take revenge for the murder of their master. The second is some nonsense about witchcraft and the third features an aspiring actress, her lover (played with gusto by Pleasence – he’s never seen a piece of scenery that he won’t chew) and, you guessed it, a villainous cat.
The Uncanny is not an unenjoyable experience, particularly for a cat lover such as myself. There are loads of cats in this movie. They are in pretty much every scene. Lounging around. Hissing. Never once threatening to look even remotely dangerous. It’s fun to see legends such as Cushing and Milland slumming it together and the wraparound story with both of them in is the only competent part of the film. The rest of it is nonsense of the highest order, and while there are grisly moments, none of it is even remotely frightening (although the film still somehow received an X rating).
While I’m glad that I exist in a world alongside a film as utterly bonkers as this, there is no pretending that it should be taken seriously as an artistic endeavour. It’s also so anti-cat that I have my suspicions that it might have actually been written and directed by a dog. That would certainly explain the lack of quality.
