This lunatic late sixties obscurity, a hippified take on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, is hardly a buried treasure. It is fun, though, an unforgettably whacked-out wallow in gore and sleaze.
BASKET CASE director and trash movie buff Frank Henenlotter had a hand in dredging up this 1968 “class-sick,” which was commercially released in the nineties by Something Weird Video. Starring boxing legend Jake La Motta (RAGING BULL himself), CONFESSIONS OF A PSYCHO CAT didn’t meet with much success during its initial run. The credited director was “Eve” (apparently a pseudonym for Herb Stanley), who appears to have filmed a horror fest and then padded it with soft core fuck scenes shot months (if not years) after the fact.
At a sex party a bunch of bored hippies wait for their pal Buddy, who’s supposed to be bringing narcotics. But when Buddy finally arrives he’s sporting a nasty leg wound attained during a recent scuffle with a crazy woman. This leads to a bizarre tale.
It seems that days earlier Buddy was invited to the cluttered pad of Virginia, the “Psycho Cat” of the title (she lost her mind as a child, when her brother tossed her pet cat off a building). There he joins Charles, an actor, and a wrestler known only as The Champ. Virginia gets right to the point: she knows the three men have all committed murder at some point, and so offers to be their avenging angel by hunting them through New York City. To sweeten the deal she offers each of them $100,000 if they can survive the hunt.
The three dudes unwisely accept Virginia’s offer, and she gets busy. She helps arrange for Charles to get a plumb part in a prominent play, and after it’s over she stabs him to death. She also makes a series of obscene phone calls to the Champ, and then, in a mock bull fight, spears him in his own backyard.
She saves Buddy for last, shooting him in the neck with an arrow—appropriately after he’s just shot himself up with heroin! Virginia’s final bow, alas, is in a nuthouse, after her father and brother find her three human “trophies” hanging in a closet.
Those seeking a well made movie had best look elsewhere, as this one is clumsy, cluttered and convoluted from start to finish. You need look no farther than the lame opening scenes, which bludgeon us with a lot of plodding sexploitation inserts, and set up the main story in clumsy fashion by first having the hero chased around by the Psycho Cat and then flashing back to his previous exploits—all the while incorporating the POVs of several supporting characters, many of whom have nothing to do with the story at hand.
However, the film only lasts 69 minutes, and its charm is in its raggedness. Any lover of bizarre cinema will thrill to the ultra-wide angle lenses and wildly off-kilter camera angles director Herb Stanley employs during the title character’s psychotic freak-outs, and the outrageous overacting of Eileen Lord as that character. In fact, I’d venture to say that the film’s two major set pieces—the murder of the Champ and its delirious aftermath that has Virginia bowing to an imaginary audience, and the latter’s deranged unveiling of her grisly trophies to her appalled family–are great filmmaking by any standard.
Vital Statistics
CONFESSIONS OF A PSYCHO CAT (a.k.a. THREE LOVES OF A PSYCHO CAT)
Something Weird Video
Director: “Eve” (Herb Stanley)
Producer: Herb Stanley
Screenplay: Bill Boyd
Cast: Eileen Lord, Jake La Motta, Arlene Lorrance, Frank Geraci, Ed Gerrabrandt, Dick Lord, Rita Bennett