Wednesday 27 January 2016

Cathy's Curse (1977)



"Just like The Exorcist, only dreadful!" probably isn't the most appealing of tag lines, but it would in this case have the benefit of being truthful.

A woman runs away from her husband.  She takes her son with her, but for some reason leaves her daughter.  The daughter and her father go tearing off in a car at great speed, for no clear reason, and end up dying in a crash.

Thirty years later, the son, now grown up and with a family of his own, moves back into the house.  This whole "moving into a house that's stood empty for decades" thing is a common staple of horror movies.  Isn't it amazing how well-maintained they all are, after their long abandonment?

Anyway, the son now has his own wife and daughter (Cathy, naturally), and it doesn't take long after they move in for the daughter to begin acting strangely.  She finds a creepy looking doll that belonged to her now-dead aunt, and becomes inseparable from it.  And to everyone except her father, she becomes steadily more hateful and malicious.

Child actor Randi Allen, who does not seem to have done anything else in the field, is surprisingly effective in the title role.  She spits her (often obscene) dialogue at most of the other cast members, while being gushing and adoring with her father.  Alas, her dialogue is about the only memorable thing in the script.  While the story is a slurry-like morass of hackneyed horror tropes (blood gushing from a faucet - never seen that before!), the writers seem to have had a passion for inventing colourful vulgarities for Cathy.

A review on IMDB indicates that certain important plot-related scenes may have been cut from this DVD version of the film.  It's unlikely you'll be interested enough in the movie to care, though.

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