FrightFest review – Don’t Let the Cat Out

FrightFest review – Don’t Let the Cat Out

Director/co-writer Tim Cruz and co-writer/actor Anthony Del Negro made FF selection Ladybug – they return with another single setting horror picture, which has a sly sense of humour to go with its far-fetched weirdness.  At heart, it’s a chase around an old dark house full of cat pictures, ornaments, accoutrements and collectabilia – one of those Felix clocks with the disturbing ticking eyeballs and wagging tails – where some devoted pet-owners are going to extreme, possibly supernatural lengths to keep their pets around.

Charlie (Del Negro), a student with an extreme allergy to cats, takes the gig of house-sitting on Halloween – which ought to be an easier ask than babysitting (see Dooba Dooba for this year’s warning against those dangers) or looking after an elderly invalid (as in The House of the Devil) but gets strange when he finds a long list of ‘don’ts’ to do with a cat called Hazel … who turns out not to be an animal but a woman (Brittany Cavaco) in a glued-on cat-suit and mask who is either possessed or into extreme role-play.  The suspense mechanics of this form of torment and captivity – Charlie has to get out of inhibiting gimp devices – require repeated escapes or near-escapes and captures and recaptures which have a justification in the film’s premise because homeowners Rodney (Jordan James Smith) and Evelyn (Cerina Vincent) are, of course, playing cat-and-mouse with their new chew-toy.

Late in the film, nurse Kim (Edy Ganem) – girlfriend of an incidental victim – turns up to complicate an already-tangled situation and give diva-like villainess Evelyn a proper (cat)fight while the comparatively feeble, wheezing Charlie is more frequently out of action than serving time as a movie hero.  Like Ladybug, it’s a scrappy, sometimes awkward film (a one-year-later epilogue drags on) with a lot of heart and a buzz of ideas and attitudes.

Cerina Vincent has some pop culture immortality as a Power Ranger in the 1990s and was a presence in horror in the early 2000s after her turn in Cabin Fever (she made a bunch of Bigfoot-type movies and was in stuff like Seven Mummies and Return to the House on Haunted Hill).  Here, dressed in a version of the Julie Newmar Catwoman suit, she takes the opportunity to play a mumsy bad girl, flirting with cops and adding an s-m edge to her tormenting of innocents lured into her home.  She’s a great deal of fun, and just broad enough in her performance to sell a lunatic premise, which involves Egyptian occult rituals and animal-human possession/reincarnation/whatever.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.