The Uncanny - Peter Cushing Anthology

"The Uncanny" is an anthology from the 70s with a pretty unusual running theme.  All of the stories involve cats.  Three short horrors, all with household felines providing the scares.  Even the wraparound story centers around a conspiracy of cats, which Cushing's character hope to reveal in a a book, with help of a publisher, portrayed by Ray Milan.

Milan and Cushing are fun as ever, but there scenes do seem to have been shot in a bit of a rush.  I honestly wouldn't have been surprised to find that they were shot in a single night.

As in many of these anthologies, the experience is uneven, with the last story, starring Donald Pleasance ( a personal favorite of mine) in a rare, almost slapstick, comedic performance.

The very first story is probably the scariest with an entire army of kitties bent on revenge against a couple scheming to get money from a sick old woman.  The pace is fairly slow at times, but it's necessary to convey the passage of time.  The acting is solid enough and some of the shots of the cats make the little critters appear truly menacing.  Add a little claustrophobia and you've got a spooky, if not fast paced, little segment.

The second film is a Cinderella kind of tale about an orphaned girl who is mistreated by her cousin turned step sister and not particularly kind aunt.  Fortunately for her, the girl's mother has left her a book on witchcraft and a black cat as a familiar and guardian.  The special F/X here make use of optical and practical methods of the time to varying effect.  At some points it plays out very well and other times it isn't convincing at all.  Not a lot of gore, but a very gruesome concept or two conveyed by suggestion.

As mentioned, the final story, with Donald Pleasance, is a kind of dark comedy.  A love triangle and murder "mystery" with a cat playing "Columbo".  There are very few surprises in this one except for how goofy it's played.  The comedy is a necessity, because nobody could take the plot seriously. Some beautiful shots here and really fun moments, but no real scares.

The wrap around story is perhaps the most sinister and again has great some angles and shot compositions.  This segment is also saved by the screen presences of Cushing and Milan.

When it comes down to is, how scary this movie is comes down to whether or not you find 15 pound tabbies to be convincingly dangerous.  A significant amount of disbelief needs to be suspended here in varying amounts depending on the story.

The biggest distraction I had was constantly seeing cat behavior that made me think the poor things may have been mistreated on set.

"Things" - Wow

"Things" is an 80's era, direct to video cassette horror movie that has a reputation for being the most inept film to ever come out of Canada.  I'm self-isolating with my wife during the Covid-19 crisis and gave this thing a watch.

Growing up, I was taught that if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.  By all measures, that should make this the end of my review of this movie.

It has all of the flaws that something shot with no budget and an inexperienced director is expected to have.  Poor color, soft focus shots, harsh, nonsensical editing, acting that is all over the map, constantly out of sync audio, annoying music (even for the 80s) and a laundry list of other things.  But, these are par for the course for a movie made in a time when even low end equipment was expensive and difficult to come by.  I know that this concept has to be hard to understand for people with 4K cameras in their pocket as part of their everyday lives, but it was a fact of life for indie filmmakers at one time.

In most cases, the cast and crew would get credit for doing the best job they could, but this movie also, even with added segments of a newscaster to fill in the gaps (and include adult film starlet Amber Lynn) doesn't make a whole lot of sense, which is a shame.  If you can eek out the basics of the story, there was something there and a clever moment or two that could have been pretty cool, but most of it was never translated to the screen.

Many reviews mention that a lot of time is spent by two guys just looking around a house.  This is not an exaggeration.  There seems to be a lot of pointless cabinet and freezer opening.

But the music was the hardest part of the movie to sit through.  It wasn't just inappropriate, ineffective or boring.  It actively annoyed me.  I nearly didn't finish the movie because I could hardly stand to listen to parts of the soundtrack.

In the end,  however, the movie commits the worst crime a movie can.  It was just boring.  For about 80% of it nothing is happening.  This may have worked effectively as suspense building with better acting, lighting, music or dialogue, but alas, those were all missing.

About the only cool thing was the creature design.  Neat little fanged bugs that reminded me a bit of the Zanti Misfits with less human features.  There is also a pretty cool effect at the end, but it is surrounded by so much silly looped dialogue that it loses all of its possible edge and just becomes a joke at the end of the only  true action sequence in the movie.

If  you want to see an oddity that could have been so much more and has a few ideas that were probably more clever than the movie they fell into made them appear, seek this movie out, but be prepared for a challenging viewing.

Trailer is NSFW.  Topless scene in there and lots of screaming and gurgling.