Confessions of a Psycho Cat - 1968

Give Eileen Lord an Oscar. Even if you sculpt it out of Floam and manage to break your huffing regimen long enough to spray-paint it a flat gold in your backyard, just do it already. Her full-tilt screeching dementia intermittently sidelined by repressed, boiling menace is more batshit crazy and flat-out entertaining than any Hollywood prestige performance I've ever seen. It has all the trimmings of typical Oscar-bait: mental illness, overcoming childhood trauma, assertive personality in the face of male oppression. Ms. Lord somehow delivers both The Most Acting and The Best Acting, two wildly divergent attributes that so rarely coalesce in today's statue-starlets; two that The Academy cannot differentiate. So I demand that we retroactively award Eileen Lord much deserved recognition for her ferocious scene-chewery. If someone can track her down, assuming she is still alive, I swear on my parents graves (I've chosen the plots, now they have to do their part...) that I will construct and deliver an award to this enigma.

"I hate killing! I hate guns! Killing is bad!"

What is the most dangerous game? Why, man, of course. What film directly steals the premise of famed short story The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell? This one, of course. Eileen Lord as wealthy socialite Virgina Marcus offers three men $100,000 each if they can survive 24 hours in Manhattan while acting as prey to her predator. Each one had been acquitted of murder in the past, so perhaps this is twisted vigilante justice wrought by pure feminine liberation? Oh you silly goose, that topic is barely broached because why bother? This skeletal premise exists solely as an excuse for visual delirium that would make Christopher Doyle drop his Heineken and take notice.

Distortion abounds as handheld wide angle insanity that would be at home in Fallen Angels metastasizes exponentially over the course of 69 minutes. While about as basic as you get, it's still nice to witness exploitation cinema with the forethought to include wide angle POV not only because it looks wacky, but to exemplify Virginia's distorted world view. Easy, but effective. The creativity extends to a wonderful home-made flashback filter made by smearing vaseline on the border of a glass pane. This blurs the edges of the frame adding a dreamlike quality to Virginia's painful remembrance of how her brother frivolously chose to toss her dog off of a building's rooftop. This is what made her a 'psycho cat', you see.

The film pops with a kinetic frenzy as Virginia pursues her hapless victims with the aforementioned visual flourishes. We don't just marvel at the ridiculousness of it, but are actually engaged and excited! This is a rare quality for this kind of 42nd street grindhouse fare. The cast tries their best to match wits with Eileen Lord resulting in surprisingly effective and pulpy performances in both the characters of the severe junkie and fledgling actor, respectively. But the final side in our targeted triumvirate is the former pro wrestler, played with grunting mush-mouthiness by a doughy Jake LaMotta. Delivering each line with beached-whale comfort, LaMotta Tor Johnsons his way through each scene buckling under the pressure of this whole being an actor thing. But this film, like Brazil's towering Christ, is a redeemer. In perhaps the most oh-my-god-are-you-shitting-me moment of my film viewing career, the chase of LaMotta climaxes with his being jabbed in the back by two(!) spears. This brings him to a crawl, both weapons sticking in his skin, resembling horns. Materializing in the darkness is Virginia, bedecked in traditional torero traje de luces, wielding a sword and all. Can you grasp what is happening? LaMotta scurries around suffering multiple stab wounds while Virginia shouts insults at our pathetic toro. He is reduced to an actual "Raging Bull". This is real, I swear.

Yep

Also real is the fact that this film originally ran a terse 55-60 minutes as most double/triple feature trash cinema offerings do. Supposedly it was even released as such. But now it runs 69 minutes because a year or so after completion, multiple nude scenes were filmed and added in the clumsiest way possible in an effort, I assume, to pull in a new midtown audience. We get multiple glimpses of the most lethargic sex party on celluloid featuring blatantly inferior audio and performances all with no ties to the main feature at all. We get narrative, then some tits, then back to the narrative. It's phenomenally awful, awe inspiring garbage. One scene that sticks out has Jake LaMotta conversing with a woman on his bed from his chair across the room. Whoever had been on his bed originally has been erased (despite seeing her clothed legs once or twice in the scene) and replaced with a whining nude vixen only tangentially responding to what Jake is asking in jarring back and forth cutting. She's clearly in a different room! It's hilariously insulting to the audiences sensibilities (yes, even for those looking for quick masturbation in a 20 seat theater) but does deliver endless treasure inherent in lines such as: "I think you're putting me down. I'm sexy and that's what I came up here for. Sex." She then slowly walks over to a mirror and makes out with her reflection for 30 seconds. Perfect.



Trash heaven