Creature Double Feature Night 6: SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE (1973), THE GHOUL (1933)

 Tonight, a double feature of prime Prime old dark house thrillers, each set rollicking over gloomy Gothic estates with their own secret chambers to the burial grounds, tombs with cats, gems and vows of vengeance beyond the grave, an assortment of shifty-eyed suspects and a couple of 'kissin' cousins' who haven't seen each other since they were kids, teaming up "shoulder-to-shoulder" in a kind of young hip 'divine right of hotness after a key death in the family ramps up the antics of a relentless killer. The denouement of both is even similar, with surprise villainy where you used to least expect it. Prizing heavy Gothic atmosphere over whodunnit base tagging, these films make a perfect October night in. Working can wait, as the old hillbilly in that WB cartoon once sang, this is para-diise... for some of us. I'm rating and reviewing these according to my eccentric patriarchal whims, as stated in my will...

Often creatively ranslated or interpreted (the English credit is "Seven Deaths in the Cats Eyes" and on imdb it's "Seven Dead in a Cat's Eye"), La morte negli occhi del gatto is worth seeing under any guise or language track, provided the colors are as lovingly soaked in dusky golden, maroon and black, as here. And with her huge eyes and endearingly crooked smile, Jane Birkin makes a fabulous Edgar Wallace-style heroine; her suitor/cousin, Hiram Keller (Satyricon) is the pretty but blank Hamlin-esque 'madman' Lord James MacGrieff, kept a virtual prisoner up in his fabulous top of the castle salon with his paints and pet gorilla (you know it's an old dark house movie when there's a gorilla, provided it's played by a guy in a gorilla suit- and this is one of the worst I've ever seen. I'm in a peculiar kind of heaven). This international-Italian/French co-production finds Lady Corringa (Birkin) hiding the fact she's been expelled from the nun-run girl's boarding school she's been attending and dropping in unannounced on her mother and her aunt, who lives in the ornate castle and won't sell it even though she'll get no more money to run it. Soon mom is dead and our unlucky ingenue is possibly going mad in a mansion full of eccentrics all vying for possession of the elaborate yet crumbling secret passage-ridden ancestral estate. She's a bit like Paulette Goddard in the 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY if the Bob Hope part was played by a brooding Byronic pretty boy chief suspect... and he had a pet gorilla; and she came to the reading of the will with her mom, but her mom was murdered and then appeared to her as a vampire ghost at night, with a Hamlet-like demand for vengeance.

The score's a bit on the dimestore Morrione cop show side, but that's hardly bad thing. The main benefit here is gorgeous photography lush enough that at times Birkin's luminous hair is so perfectly reflected in her candelabra's lamplight we can count the strands. This film bumps up three stars now that it's not a panned, scanned, washed-out mess. Margheriti clearly loves along with the writing of the godfather of the giallo, Edgar Wallace.



One of the stand-out elements here are the clothes, which 'nod' to an assumed setting of 1930's England, but just nod, keeping the high fashion edge rather than getting bogged down in stuffy details like bowler hats and woolen overcoats. For her mourning wear (above) Birkin is given a beautiful black fur collar and her nightgown's sexy without being tacky (Von Sternberg would have approved). The whole production, aside from lingering close-ups of rats eating the face of victim #1, is very tasteful. The music is the orchestral suspense-generating variety rather than the moody giallo electric guitars of the time, but that's not worth a demerit. Indeed, the only demerit is maybe dubbing Serge Gainsbourg (he's the detective) with a fake Scotch burr.