Cat People - 1942 ***

This film seems to have been almost impossible to track down, and it was only by chance that I saw it was to be on late one night that I recorded it.

Anyway, in the end it didn't really matter, because it wasn't nearly as good as I was expecting it to be.

Simone Simon (I've always thought it was a stupid name) plays a woman named Irene who meets a draftsman and falls in love with him. However she is paralysed with fear that if she becomes intimate with him she will turn into a cat, like the Serbian myths told her in her childhood. However she goes ahead and gets married, and her husband soon realises that she needs serious help with her fears and tries to get her to see a psychiatrist.

It goes from being pretty terrifying (you will all have seen the famous scene where the woman is walking down a dark street and stops every now and again because she thinks she is being followed. It's really quite a scary scene) to being absolutely ridiculous (the girl jumping into the swimming pool in the dark because she thinks that will deter the giant black cat that is chasing her) with a load of dull blurb in between. Except for a few exciting moments there isn't much to recommend in this film.