Steinesongo Too many fans seem to be blown away

Blucher One of the worst movies I've ever seen

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

bkoganbing No supernatural creatures in this Hammer film, but a lot of the human cast in The Shadow Of The Cat thinks Tabitha is the feline from hell. Not that they don't deserve what happens to them.The film opens with Andre Morrell murdering his wife who controls the family fortune and with the connivance of two servants Andrew Crawford and Freda Jackson. The only witness to the event was Tabitha the cat and the sight of the cat gives them guilty consciences.Other relatives arrive including Barbara Shelley and her fiancé Conrad Phillips and Shelley is the only one that Tabitha behaves with. The others now influenced by Morrell all hate the cat, ascribing all kinds of supernatural behavior. And attempts to trap and kill it result in a whole lot of the cast being eliminated.This is a good one from Hammer because it relies on the human failings for these people to fail. Tabitha has no powers, she's just smarter than the rest of the humans in the cat. Cat's got Pussynality.

Spikeopath The Shadow of the Cat is directed by John Gilling and written by George Baxt. It stars Conrad Phillips, Barbara Shelley, André Morell, Richard Warner, William Lucas and Andrew Crawford. Music is by Mikis Theodorakis and cinematography by Arthur Grant.Tabitha the house cat witnesses her mistress being murdered by her scheming family and sets about enacting revenge...Out of BHP Films, which is basically Hammer Films using an alias due to a technical legality, The Shadow of the Cat is a delightfully eerie entrant in the pantheon of Old Dark House movies.The picture kicks off with the brutal murder of an old dear, the setting a moody mansion full of shadows, murky rooms, rickety floors, nooks and crannies, and this while Tabitha the cat watches intensely. From here we meet the roll call of family and house servants, the majority of whom are nefarious, and as the paranoia builds amongst the guilty, their reasons for dastardly doings evident, Tabitha goes about her cunning assassinations.Of for sure it's bonkers in plotting, but Gilling (The Plague of the Zombies/The Reptile) was a very astute director, and he manages to wring much suspense and unease from the story, whilst he's not shy to play up some humour and even adds some decent shocks into the bargain. Cast are on good form, playing it just the way it should be played, and the Bray Studio surrounding areas once again prove to be a useful location for such horror shenanigans.Aided by Grant's (The Tomb of Ligeia/The Curse of the Werewolf) beautiful black and white photography, Gilling proves masterful at atmosphere. Naturally we have the requisite thunderstorm, but it's the oblique angles and looming shadows that really fill the mood with impending dread. While the use of a stretch screen technique to portray the cat's POV (Catovision?) is a nice trick that works very effectively.It's a hard film to get hold of, but there are decent sources available to view it (the Onyx Media International double DVD with Cat Girl is a good transfer that does justice to the photography). It's still under seen and little known due to its lack of availability. Which is a shame, because for fans of Old Dark House creepers there's good fun to be had here. 8/10

Theo Robertson This owes a lot to both Edgar Allan Poe and Hammer Studios . A man murders his wife with the help of his two servants to claim the inheritance quickly realising her cat Tabitha has witnessed the murder and is bent on revenge . It sounds slightly bonkers and it is but Poe in his short story The Black Cat brought a credibility to a macabre story of revenge . THE SHADOW OF THE CAT is much more in keeping with the spirit of Poe compared to the 1930s Universal film starring Karloff and Lugosi which took the title of Poe's story but absolutely nothing else .Alas SHADOW OF THE CAT is a rather mundane melodrama . Andre Morrell can do no wrong in my opinion and realises what sort of film he's appearing in and acts accordingly - by hamming things up every chance he gets including a laugh inducing scene where he's stuck in a cellar and shrieks like a banshee as he fights off an attack by Tabitha . As for the rest of the cast they're very mundane who have little impact in a film with a cheap feel with a rather uninteresting screenplay featuring a cat on a revenge mission . Maybe they could have got Charles Bronson to play Tabitha ?

capkronos On a stormy night, elderly Ella Venable (Catherine Lacey) reads aloud a passage from Poe's "The Raven" before a man sneaks up behind her and clubs her over the head. Her body is wrapped up and carried outside as the woman's cat Tabitha, who witnessed the crime, quickly rushes out the door. The victim turns out to be a very wealthy woman who has been trapped in a loveless 30-year marriage to Walter (André Morell), who made no qualms about marrying her for her money. We also learn that her killer, Andrew the butler (Andrew Crawford), as well as the maid, Clara (Freda Jackson) are also in on the murder and have been promised a healthy cut of the inheritance if they play along. Ella's body is buried in a shallow grave somewhere on the property. A few days after the murder, Walter contacts the police to let them know his wife has disappeared. He's also taken provisions to ensure he's left everything in the estate by forging a will. However, the actual will is hidden somewhere in the home and must be found and destroyed before anyone else can get their hands on it. Promptly following Ella's disappearance, several relatives arrive at the home. First up is Ella's beloved niece Elizabeth (Barbara Shelley), who seems to be the only person her dead aunt actually loved. Also coming in for a visit are Walter's brother Edgar (Richard Warner), his sleazy, skirt-chasing son Jacob (William Lucas) and Jacob's smarmy wife Louise (Vanda Godsell). Those three are also in on the murder and, just like the two servants, have been payed off to keep quiet and assist in locating the missing will as well as helping throw off the investigators.So who's going to teach these greedy, murderous, thieving scumbags a lesson? Why Ella's beloved pet puss Tabitha, of course! She makes life a living hell for each of the conspirators; clawing, hissing and causing a general uneasiness and panic amongst them. They all want her captured and killed, which makes them look all the more suspicious to both Elizabeth and the investigators. Hey, it's just a cat, right? But this cat is no ordinary cat. It ignores plates of poisoned meat left around the house and when it's lured into a trap by the tempting treat of live mice, put in a sack and stands the chance of being dunked in the backyard swamp waters, it manages to escape and knock someone into a quicksand bog in the process. The kitty also finds ways to start killing them off one by one; knocking one down a flight of stairs, giving the weak-hearted one in the group a heart attack by rushing at his head and finding other methods of punishing the guilty. Tabitha has plenty of clever tricks up her, uh, paw.Naturally, a film portraying a domesticated animal going about getting revenge for its slain owner by committing premeditated murder is going to be called far-fetched by some, but this is a horror film we're talking about. I don't see why such nonexistent creatures as vampires, zombies and unkillable slasher maniacs who get shot hundreds of times but keep on tickin' are tolerated but people have a hard time accepting a vengeance-minded domestic cat doing the same thing. Any film with fantasy content requires the suspension of disbelief, and this is no different. But the movie is very well done for what it is. The cast is excellent, it's well paced, the Gothic mansion setting is perfect for this kind of material, the cat itself is fun to watch and there's an interesting score from Mikis Theodorakis, which alternates between commanding to almost whimsical. There is also some clever distorted camera-work to represent the cat's point of view.Even though the production company is listed as BHP (who according to IMDb only did two other films), it might as well be considered a Hammer Production. In fact, the director, the writer, the editor, the cinematographer, the production designer, the makeup artist and much of the cast frequently worked for Hammer. It was also filmed at Bray Studios. I don't know if the studio lent its resources out to an independent producer or what, but this definitely has that Hammer feel to it and will probably be appreciated by any fan of their usual films.