Entertainment

Cult Movies: Paul Schrader's Cat People re-make remains a sleek and slinky beast all of its own.

Nastassja Kinski in Cat People
Nastassja Kinski in Cat People Nastassja Kinski in Cat People

Cat People

OCCASIONALLY – just occasionally – a re-make of a classic movie can actually deliver the goods.

The 1982 take on Cat People is a good example. Writer and director Paul Schrader's re-tooling of Jacques Tourneur's much loved and deeply moody 1942 masterpiece of psychological menace, freshly reissued this month by Shout! Factory, works for several reasons. It looks great, has a memorable soundtrack from Giorgio Moroder (including a theme tune delivered by David Bowie) and boasts a fine cast including Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, Annette O'Toole and John Heard.

Perhaps the thing that Schrader's re-imagining does best of all, though, is that it feels original. Bar taking the simple premise of sexual repression that lurks at the core of Tourneur's original, it feels like a totally different movie.

Kinski is Irene Gallier, a young woman cut adrift when her adoptive parents pass away. She takes a trip to New Orleans to visit her long gone brother Paul (McDowell) with whom she shares an odd, almost paranormal connection.

It seems both are descended from a line of so called 'cat people', people who turn into panthers after mating. The only way they can regain human form is to kill. Paul knows that now his sister is older, she'll need to try to control her more primal urges. Whether she listens to him is another matter, however.

A visit to the city zoo sees Irene fall in with the boss Oliver Yates (Heard). She gets a job working in the zoo gift shop and the attraction between the two grows rapidly. At this point, things get a tad odder, as a sleek black panther kills a prostitute and a zoo guard before tracking down Oliver at his house and trying to kill him as well.

It doesn't succeed, as his partner Alice (Annette O'Toole) arrives just in time to save his skin, but it swiftly becomes apparent that Paul's motives are darker than they may have first appeared, and an unhealthy love triangle swiftly develops with predictably grim results.

If the simmering sexual themes lay buried well below the surface in the 1942 film, this re-make drags them screaming out into the daylight. This being the 1980s, there's nudity galore, and while it all feels a tad 'softcore porn' at times, there's still a sense of style about Schrader's vision and it rarely feels too exploitative.

There are flashback sequences galore and the shifting between past and present is well handled, with beautiful windswept visuals that are enhanced by that neat Moroder score throughout.

All the cast deliver fine performances here, with the young Kinski unfolding into her animalistic persona impressively and McDowell reining-in his natural instinct to maul the scenery as best he can.

Yes, it's all very 80s, and the overly-ripe Freudianism gets a little irritating at times, but this is still a film well worth re-investigating. It may not match the 1942 original for mood or classiness, but as a document of 80s excess and an example of how to tackle a well known original while making something fresh out of it, Cat People remains a sleek and slinky beast all of its own.