Cat Girl *** (1957, Barbara Shelley, Robert Ayres, Kay Callard) – Classic Movie Review 2758

Director Alfred Shaughnessy’s 1957 Anglo-American horror movie stars Barbara Shelley, who is perfectly cast in this eerie chiller as Leonora Brandt, a young woman who returns to her ancestral home and is told she has inherited both money and a family curse of being possessed by the spirit of a leopard.

So Leonora becomes a rich killer leopard when she is angered thanks to inheriting the family curse. She has already bumped off her hubby and now she wants to sink her teeth into a psychiatrist called Dr Brian Marlowe (Robert Ayres), who foolishly believes there’s a rational explanation for her troubles. And then she is planning to do in his wife Dorothy (Kay Callard).

Shaughnessy’s movie is quite often as daft as it is scary, but it is no less entertaining for that. Writer Lou Rusoff penned the original screenplay, though it has similarities to Jacques Tourneur’s much earlier classic Cat People.

American International Pictures released it in a double feature with The Amazing Colossal Man (1957). It is the first Anglo-American co-production from AIP, which offered $25,000 of the budget and a screenplay by their regular writer Rusoff in exchange for Western hemisphere rights.

It is the first of two cat-themed films starring Barbara Shelley, the other being The Shadow of the Cat.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2758

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