– She has the power…to terrorize. And to make us laugh.
This amusing French/Canadian-produced little clown show starts with a father and his daughter, Laura, who learns that the mom has left them and taken Laura’s brother, George, with her. Your mother is a bitch. She’ll pay for what she did to you, says the dad. Oki-doki. As they’re driving through the woods at the night, a white rabbit suddenly crosses the road that makes the dad lose control and crash. Dad and Laura get stuck in the car as it sets on fire where they get burned alive. At least, the rabbit got away unscathed.
Then we jump to present time (1977), where George, who’s now a middle-aged man, his wife Vivian and their young daughter Cathy, are moving into the house we saw in the opening sequence. George hasn’t been in the house since he was four and does his best to act emotional. Vivian has some mental and paranoia issues after she had a nervous breakdown and has some extreme mood-swings. Another one who suffers from sudden mood-swings, plus some late stages of dementia, is the film itself, because nothing here, absolutely nothing makes sense. As Cathy explores the house, she finds herself in the cobweb-filled attic where she picks up a ragdoll with both eyes stitched shut. Cathy then looks at a picture of the ominous girl we see at the movie poster, and Cathy gets possessed. Why? Not even the three screenwriters knows.
The film is all over the place with random stuff that just happens because the messy script just says so. A medium visits Vivian, a woman I almost mistook for Mr. Bean’s girlfriend. She holds an old picture of Vivian’s husband’s father, the guy we saw in the beginning. She sees flashes of the car accident as she talks in a cheesy demonic voice. Nothing here builds up, things happen sporadically just out of the blue. Cathy suddenly has telekinesis Carrie powers so she can make random objects in the house explode. In one scene, Cathy has breakfast, served by a nanny. Cathy throws a bowl to the floor, just randomly, with both hands to demonstrate that the bowl flies across the kitchen. Nanny acts like it was just an accident. After she picks up two pieces of the shattered bowl, she smiles and says: There, it’s all done. Ok, if you say so. I guess the screenwriters thought they did a great job here to not insult the viewers’ intelligence.
Another memorable scene, for all the wrong reasons, is where Cathy starts to teleport herself around the house to scare her mother. She acts way more irritated than scared, because none of the three scriptwriters would even imagine that anyone would shit themselves if they witnessed such a thing. Vivian must have some serious brain damage or some skills in pills, or maybe both. Cathy then makes the whole house shake. This movie is more tone-deaf than Yoko Ono. And, of course, I have to mention the classic scene where Cathy makes an old drunk geezer freeze while he sits by the kitchen table. And while he just sits there, stiff frozen, a snake and some spiders suddenly appear and crawls at him. And we have some stellar dialogues here:
– Old bitch. Fat whore. Fat dried up whore.
– Go on, you filthy female cow. Make us laugh!
– All women are bitches.
The eye-catching poster reminds me of the poster of James Wan’s Insidious. But don’t let that fool you. Cathy’s Curse is not even close. It’s barely close to even being a horror movie. I even doubt that the three screenwriters, that also includes the director, was never under the same roof during the writing process. I’d guess that all three took elements from The Exorcist (1973), Carrie (1976) and The Omen (1976), with the same idea of “children scary“ then tossed it together and maybe just hoped for the best. The messy and incompetent writing is just one thing, we also have some weird music choices, primitive effects (even for a 1970s film) and bizarre editing. In one scene the camera zooms slowly into a door with some ominous music, just randomly. We don’t see much of that door again. The acting goes from wooden to laughably bad. The “big star“ here is the child actress Randi Allen as Cathy. And she’s no Linda Blair, just to make that clear. This is the one and only film she appeared in, and said in an interview once that she only took the role to financially support her single mother. To add some extra quick cash, her brother, Bruce Allen, also had a small role in the film.
Cathy’s Curse is a nonsensical mess that only leaves questions rather than answers, and is as scary as My Little Pony, but the overall inept absurdity makes it a fun watch.
Director: Eddy Matalon
Writers: Alain Sens-Cazenave, Eddy Matalon, Myra Clément
Country & year: Canada, 1977
Actors: Alan Scarfe, Beverly Murray, Randi Allen, Dorothy Davis, Mary Morter, Roy Witham, Bryce Allen, Sonny Forbes, Robert V. Girolami
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075820/
