Probably not, since I'm pretty sure I'm the first blogger to use that word, but anyway: phobiasploitation is the term for a brand of cinema in which the filmers use the protagonist's (or ANtagonist's, either/or) fear of something as a crux of the plot. You know like Craig Wasson's character's claustrophobia came into play in Body Double, Jack Nicholson's character's OCD was prominent in As Good As It Gets, Bill Murray's character's fear of...everything was the main point in What About Bob?...there's plenty but I could be here all day.
Anyway, phobiasploitation can be used on the audience, too. Whatever someone's innermost fear is, chances are pretty good there's a horror movie based on it. If you don't like mannequins, don't watch Tourist Trap. If you don't like ventriloquist dummies, don't watch Magic or Devil Doll (actually, don't watch Magic under any circumstances - that's just good advice in genereal). And if you don't like cats, then don't watch
Pet Sematary, Strays, Sleepwalkers, The Uncanny, "Top Cat", Uninvited, Two Evil Eyes, Black Cat, The Corpse Grinders, Cat People (either version), "Heathcliff", Eye Of The Cat, Cat in the Brain, Cat's Eye, both Garfield movies, Cat in the Hat, "Toonces The Driving Cat"...
...or my review subject for today, Night Of A 1000 Cats.
Yeah, that's what it's called. Not Night of 1000 Cats or Night of A Thousand Cats. Night Of A 1000 Cats. They had those vowels and, by golly, they're usin' them.
You don't believe me? Look at this:
Now drop it and let's go on, 'kay?
They really played up the anti-cat vibe for this one, lemme tell you. Director René Cardona Jr. (who is an old hand at doing this kind of thing) and co-writer Mario Zacarias made absolute sure that anyone who watched this film knew cats, especially the ones in this film, were evil. Wicked. Vile. Mean. Nasty. They'd probably deal drugs and blow up boatloads of nuns if they had a chance. At the very least they'd eat you. Because cats eat people.
What? You didn't know that? Oh yeah: why do you think they lick you every so often? They're tasting you.
Evil things.
Evil cats.
Evil plot: Millionaire playboy Hugo (Hugo Stiglitz) flies around Acapulco in his private helicopter to pick up sexy young women. He whisks them away to his secluded old castle, where he wines and dines them and...does other things with them, ifyouknowwhatimeanandithinkyoudo. With the aid of his large bald mute helper Dorgo (Gerardo Zepeda), he kills his dates, keeping their heads in a handy series of clear plastic cubes filled with various flavors of Jello and feeding their chopped up body parts to his 1000-strong army of blood thirty, flesh hungry cats.
There is not one honest-to-God memorable performance in this whole thing. I just saw it again and cannot remember any memorable acting or actors in it. Stiglitz may have been a top draw in Mexico for decades but he is so bland, so non-emotive and so completely stick-in-the-mud plain that you gotta wonder what all the fuss was about. Sure, he was in movies like Nightmare City and Zombie Apocalypse later on, but that's like stepping up from road kill carcass removal to septic tank cleaning.
You really cannot get more b-movie than this. The main purpose of any woman in Night Of A 1000 Cats is to scream. The main purpose of any man in Night Of A 1000 Cats is to be an evil cypher. The main purpose of any cat in Night Of A 1000 Cats is to eat the women and/or men. And that's this movie's world-view. If only life were so simple....
And speaking of simple: writers Cardona Jr. and Mario Zacarias do their utmost ding-dang-darndest to make every single person in this movie - even the villain - an idiot. There is no common sense employed by anyone.
Hey ladies; is a crazy man buzzing over your head in a helicopter while you're trying to sunbathe? That means you're destined to be together - time for a hook-up.
Hey men; did someone just beat you at chess? They're your mortal enemy - KILL 'EM!
Hey felines; has somebody gathered a bunch of you - say, maybe a thousand or so - into a huge cage in the dungeon of a castle and are feeding you nothing but ground-up human? Sorry, you're a man-and-woman-eating monster now. Too bad for ya.
In fact anything outside of the script, such as thinking your way out of a situation, carrying on an intelligent discussion based on anything rooted in normal sentence structure or talking sense into someone who is about to kill you and grind up your meat for their cats is absolutely out of the question.
Sorry. No can do.
Wish I could help you, but that would mean that the writers would have to focus on something other than killing people and finding a new fruit flavor of gelatin to stick their rubbery head in.
In fact the only thing Cardona focuses on more than evil cats is helicopters. There are so many shots of Hugo's personal helicopter out on the prowl in the skies of beautiful downtown Mexico to pick up chicks for lovers/cat chow that you'd think you were at the air show for a while. A LONG while, actually, seeing as how when Hugo's not in his dark foreboding castle he's playing Sky Captain And The World Of 1972. I'd say the chopper footage takes up a good third of the film time, easily.
Which brings up this point: the copy of the movie I have clocks in at 63 minutes total. About as long as your average Laurel and Hardy movie, to be fair. And I know there are longer versions of this movie out there...it's just that I have no idea what they could have cut out of this or what I'm missing. There is more of this, but what is it?
Were there more shots of women's heads in Jello? Were there more scenes of cats milling about? More footage of Hugo's chopper humming lazily through the sky? More lady victims running and screaming? More of Torgo...uh, I mean Dorgo, sorry...standing around and being fat, bald and menacing? More of our Chris Mitchum-wannabe Hugo Stiglitz glowering and modeling his Foster Grants? Maybe we're missing an entire subplot of this whole being masterminded by the dogs of the world in order to give their feline adversaries a bad name. THAT would be worth seeing.
I'm afraid the truth of it is Night Of A 1000 Cats' missing footage wouldn't be any more interesting than what we've already seen. And to be fair, this is the kind of movie that should have been more of what we see carnivorous cat movies for.
We need more cat attacks, more corpses, more wild-eyed hissing kitties, more sweaty and screaming victims, more evilly-leering men, and more blood, too. This thing doesn't really get as bloody as you'd expect and that's surprising - you expect a movie about flesh-eating cats to be a lot messier in terms of what it shows. Were they afraid of insulting someone's sensibilities? We can implicate that cats are eating women, sure, but NO BLOOD! we have standards to uphold!
It doesn't exactly play like an ABC Movie Of The Week, but maybe falls more into the mold of a CBS Late Night Movie. Either way, it's going to feel like you have to scour the cutting room floor for 'the good stuff'.
But that's the thing - there is no good stuff in Night Of A 1000 Cats: it promises a lot, gives us the atmosphere, but flip-flops at the crucial moment of truth and goes into Implication Territory to show trays of finely-butchered meat and not a drop of blood to be seen. It's not like other grindhouse beauties of the Seventies skimped on the ever-important topics of blood, gore, nudity and a full frontal assault on good taste. Night Of A 1000 Cats is practically demure in comparison.
And if there's one thing a killer cat movie doesn't need to be, it's demure.
Still, if you know someone who doesn't like cats and you really want to get back at 'em, this is the movie you want to lock them in a room with. As far as phobiasploitation goes, Night Of A 1000 Cats does have that going for it. And heads in Jello. And helicopters. And Hugo Stiglitz being all Hugo Stiglitz-y.
But if you're looking for something more horrific with felines in it that's sure to give you nightmares the rest of your life...go rent Catwoman.
