I don't suppose any horror film has created more critical controversy than Curse of the Cat People. It has its admirers, its detractors and those who stand in the middle. Me, I'm a firm admirer. I love the movie. I think it's almost perfect. Ann Carter is so convincing a little actress, it doesn't really matter that Simone Simon's role is so small, nor that the script is sometimes a bit ambiguous, nor that the story sometimes heads in one direction only to veer off in another. Miss Carter not only holds it all together but overshadows any and all deficiencies in script, support acting and production. It doesn't matter to me whether Irena is a real ghost or whether she exists solely in Amy's imagination. I don't care if Amy's fantasy world is Disneyesque, - why wouldn't it be? If the attitudes of her parents and teacher appear stiff or inconsistent or enigmatic, isn't this precisely the way they could be interpreted by a child? Once you view the movie from Amy's perspective, the inconsistencies and non-sequiters, the oddities and half-explained events, don't just dissolve but become part of the fabric of the child's vision. Such is the skill of Wise's editing and direction, it's impossible to tell where he begins and another leaves off. Musuraca's moodily atmospheric photography gives the images a luster that are always a joy to behold. The sets strikingly contrast Victorian fusty with cleanly modern, the workaday real with romantic fantasy. Irena's costume has been criticized, but isn't it precisely the trailing-sleeved gown of a fairytale princess? The music too, the carols, are highly appropriate. An engrossing 70 minutes. The pace never falters. The only thing wrong with The Curse of the Cat People is its title. OTHER VIEWS: Great acting from Ann Carter who is actually the lead in this alleged "sequel", with some excellent support from Sir Lancelot as the little missy's minder, Julia Dean as a half-mad old thespian and Elizabeth Russell as her embittered daughter, and of course Simone Simon as the is-she-menacing-or-is-she-not wraith of traumatic past. These players more than overcome any slight feelings of doubt audiences may have about the story and its veracity. John Howard Reid writing as Charles Freeman.

Strike One: labeled as "horror" which simply can't be more inaccurate. If this is "horror" then "Halloween" is a "family" film.Strike Two: There is no obvious or even subtle "curse" as mentioned in the title of the film.Strike Three: There are no "cat people" anywhere to be seen.For reasons I cannot fathom, many reviewers here give the film a pass on all of this and rave about the film while stating "oh just forget the title." OK...recall the sequel to "Frankenstein" - "Bride of Frankenstein" - now imagine there is NO bride, there is NO Dr. Frankenstein, and only the monster appears, but only in a few scenes and not really as the monster but in some other manifestation, and it turns out the film has nothing really at all to do with Frankenstein or the monster or the bride, but some other character you'd never heard of. Um, what? That would be a mess. And yet, that is what you have here with "Curse of the Cat People." This cannot be excused, I'm sorry.I understand that Val Lewton wanted to name the film something else and not have it linked to "Cat People," but he lost that argument to RKO and as a result we have this film as is. It must be graded as such, and unfortunately it's a jumbled mess that doesn't make much sense when viewed as the continuing story from the original. Perhaps the most aggravating aspect of the film (aside from the title) is the father, Oliver, suddenly having a serious memory block on what happened at the climax of "Cat People." In that one, his first wife was revealed to be able to change into a panther and she literally died in panther form. Oliver witnessed this and it's how the film ended. Suddenly six years later his memory has apparently been completely lost and now he says his first wife 'drove herself mad' because she believed fantasy stories! Wait, what? Does Oliver not remember seeing his dead panther-wife lying on the ground six years ago? What are you talking about? This made absolutely no sense, even more so when he became intolerant of his daughter's alleged fantasies, because having witnessed a real-life panther woman, he of all people should be open to fantastical stories. But no.It was also irritating for Oliver to castigate his daughter Amy for not having friends or playing with them, because what we are shown doesn't jive with his claims. The opening scenes show Amy playing with other children. Yes, her mind wanders as she sits there, but she is playing with them. Later when talk of her birthday party comes up, she is excited and rattles off the names of at least five children she expects to see at her party. If this child was a loner with no friends, how is she able to identify several children coming to her party? And why is she excited to see them? And later, when it is learned that the party invitations were not mailed, and thus the children weren't invited, the children are upset by this and shun Amy in retribution. Now, if Amy was a loner with no friends, why would all of these children care about her party at all? They shouldn't even want to go. None of this makes any sense. The film-makers utterly failed to establish that Amy really was a loner or a dreamer who was losing touch with reality. She was a typical little girl who occasionally chased butterflies and somehow this translates into 'she lives in a fantasy world?' I don't think so.The film suffers from these flaws, and others, and what you're left with is a confusing hodge-podge that also, at times, manages to exude some real charm. That comes mainly from Ann Carter as Amy; she was very convincing, especially for a child actor. I also enjoyed Simone Simon's 'cameo' and the cinematography is also noteworthy.In sum, not a total loss, but not at all as advertised. More like a sheep in wolves' clothing (jumbled on purpose, because it falls flat and is not horror in any sense of the word). 6/10.

I actually enjoyed this film ore than the much more famous Cat People.This film is worth watching for a number of different reasons.Most people watch this film because of Simone Simone. And while I am a major fan of Simone, this is not one of her better films. She has what amounts to a cameo - as few scenes in which she plays the ghost of Irena - the character from the Cat People film.The central character is actually child actress Ann Carter. She is absolutely mesmerizing in the role of a lonely child. Sadly, she made few films before becoming struck down by polio. It is amazing what can be done with a tiny budget - and a great amount of imagination. For a film buff, the fact that this is the first film directed by Robert Wise, makes it worth watching. He has an adept hand at directing even at this very early stage in his career.

"The Curse of the Cat People" is, officially, a sequel to "Cat People" from two years earlier. The two films had the same producer, Val Lewton, and the same scriptwriter, DeWitt Bodeen, although they had different directors. (Robert Wise, later to become famous for films like "West Side Story" and "The Sound of Music", earned his first directing credit by completing the film after the original director, Gunther von Fritsch, was sacked for working too slowly). They starred the same three actors, Kent Smith, Simone Simon and Jane Randolph, in the same roles. And yet the two films are quite different in tone and style, so different that they could be described as belonging to separate genres. "Cat People" is a horror movie, albeit far more subtle and restrained than many films which go by that description today, whereas "The Curse of the Cat People" can best be described as a supernatural fantasy. The action takes place several years after the events narrated in "Cat People". That film's hero Oliver Reed- a name which was later to be made famous by an actor- is now married to Alice, and they have a six-year- old daughter, Amy. Amy is a strange child, intelligent and imaginative but shy, withdrawn and introverted, and her parents, especially Oliver, are worried because she spends so much time daydreaming and she finds it difficult to make friends at school. Oliver's worries are rooted in his sad memories of his first wife Irena who he believes went mad because of an over-active imagination, culminating in her suicide. (Those who have seen "Cat People" will realise that the reasons for Irena's death were more complex than that, but Oliver has never accepted the truth about his first wife).Amy does, however, make two friends. One is Julia Farren, an elderly, reclusive and half-mad former actress who lives in a big house in the village with only her daughter Barbara for company. Julia, however, is under the delusion that Barbara died many years ago and that the woman living with her is an impostor pretending to be her daughter. The strain of caring for her impossible mother is slowly driving Barbara mad herself, and she conceives an irrational hatred of young Amy. Amy's other friend is none other than the deceased Irena, who appears to her as a ghost. Some have interpreted the ghostly Irena as a mere figment of Amy's imagination, although I don't think that this interpretation really works. Supernatural fantasies, often involving ghosts, were popular in the forties; examples include (from America) "The Ghost and Mrs Muir", "Portrait of Jennie", "I Married a Witch", "It's a Wonderful Life" and (from Britain) "Blithe Spirit" and "A Matter of Life and Death". Perhaps the war had had the effect of turning people's thoughts towards the afterlife. "The Curse of the Cat People" is another film in this tradition, and I think that we are supposed to accept that Irena really has returned from the grave to watch over the daughter of her one-time husband. Lewton, in fact, did not like the film's title and wanted to change it to "Amy and Her Friend" to emphasise the differences in tone between this film and its predecessor. The studio (RKO), however, insisted on keeping the phrase "cat people" in the title to cash in on the success of the previous film. Their marketing strategy, using slogans like "The Beast Woman Stalks the Night Anew", also suggested, wrongly, that this was a horror film like the first. Yet in some ways their choice of title was an appropriate one. Irena, a sinister, threatening character in the earlier film, here becomes a benevolent one, the implication being that the curse which afflicted her in life has been lifted in death and that she now has the chance to atone for the evil she once caused by acting as Amy's guardian spirit. Simone Simon, so effective as the menacing, feline Irena of the first film, has to call on very different acting skills here. The lovely Simone, despite her beauty and obvious talent, never really became a big-name star, possibly because she never seemed able to decide whether she was happier working in America or in her native France. It is perhaps significant that the name Irena, a variant of Irene, derives from "eirene", the Greek for "peace". The film ends on a note of serenity and reconciliation with the breach between Amy and her parents healed through Irena's agency. Despite its low budget and the change of directors halfway through, "The Curse of the Cat People" achieves the rare feat, for a sequel, of being not only as good as the original film but also completely different from it. 8/10