"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Kent Smith’

The Curse of the Cat People

Wednesday, January 15th, 2020

THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE is a cool and unusual sequel because it is a direct followup to CAT PEOPLE with the same characters, and it references the events of the first movie, but it’s an entirely different premise. It came out in 1944, two years later, but theoretically takes place in the then-future because Oliver (Kent Smith) and Alice (Jane Randolph), his assistant who he conveniently left his now dead wife Irena (Simone Simon) for when he thought her cat person beliefs were psychological problems, have had enough time to get married and have a little blond six-year old named Amy (Ann Carter, I MARRIED A WITCH). After failing so spectacularly with his first wife, he uses her tragic ending as justification to continue the exact same oblivious behavior with his daughter, worrying about her being too imaginative and accusing her of “lies” when she tells him strange things like that she heard a voice speaking to her. Once again, the girl he doesn’t believe is 100% correct, and shutting her down makes everything worse. That’s the curse of the cat people.

In his defense, some of this is probly hard to deal with. Little Amy has a potentially traumatic fiasco where nobody shows up for her birthday party and dad figures out that when she went to deliver the invitations she put them in a fuckin tree hole instead of a mailbox, believing that would work. And then not only does she have a childless birthday, but the next day the kids at school believe they weren’t invited and are mean to her. I’m not sure how you deal with something like that as a parent. (read the rest of this shit…)

Cat People (1942)

Thursday, January 9th, 2020

Well, this isn’t news to the world, but I can now personally confirm that Jacques Tourneur’s CAT PEOPLE (1942) is a simple, moody little black and white horror classic. It has a strange mythology (woman believes she’s descended from a tribe that turned into panthers when jealous or horny), but any monster business is late and brief and primarily implied by shadows (and a little bit of animation). Mostly this is a movie about men and women and their relationships.

Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon, THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER) is the one possibly belonging to the titular race. She’s an immigrant from Serbia and a fashion illustrator. In her spare time she likes to go to the Central Park Zoo to paint the animals. One day she’s tossing one of her sketches in the trash and misses. Oliver Reed (not the actor [THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM] but a fictional character played by Kent Smith [BILLY JACK GOES TO WASHINGTON]) is the dipshit standing near the garbage who gives her shit about it. He strikes up a conversation, they have tea, next thing you know they’re married. (read the rest of this shit…)

Taking Tiger Mountain

Tuesday, September 10th, 2019

TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN – not to be confused with Tsui Hark’s THE TAKING OF TIGER MOUNTAIN – is a surreal post-apocalyptic experimental black and white art film, shot in 1975, screened in 1983, and never released on video until Vinegar Syndrome’s recent blu-ray. It’s most notable as the first performance by the late great Bill Paxton, who is the lead as well as the production designer.

Like many people, I’m sure, I most associate Paxton with his funny whiny guy roles, especially Hudson in ALIENS. Game over, etc. And he stayed strongly associated with James Cameron as not only the lead in the present day section of TITANIC, but the real life friend who told Cameron, emerging from an actual expedition to the Titanic wreckage, about the 9-11 attacks (as seen in the Imax documentary GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS). They both came out of the Roger Corman school – Paxton worked as a set decorator on EAT MY DUST, BIG BAD MAMA and GALAXY OF TERROR, where the two first met. Though we all know Paxton ended up making it as both a leading man in blockbusters and a reliable character actor, remember that he directed the 1980 novelty music video “Fish Heads,” the 2001 supernatural religious thriller FRAILTY, and the 2005 golfing drama THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED. He was a filmmaker. But as a 19 year old working as a set dresser for the educational films of Encyclopedia Brittanica Features he befriended director Kent Smith (writer: MASSAGE: THE TOUCH OF LOVE; composer: VENEREAL DISEASE: THE HIDDEN EPIDEMIC), who thought he’d make a good star for an independent movie. (read the rest of this shit…)