Cathy's Curse (Eddy Matalon, 1977)

Oh hell yeah. Cathy's Curse is a big, fat slice of '70s Canadian weirdness that cannot be denied. Or understood. I don't know if this is a good film or a bad one, if it makes sense or if it doesn't, if anyone in it can act or if they can't. None of this matters. Cathy's Curse exists in its own weird universe. It makes its own rules. It breaks its own rules. In a titanically shitty week (my cat Fern died, my depression came roaring back, all the other terrible things that have been happening kept happening, etc.), this movie was just what I needed to take me out of Earth One and place me in Earth Two (the alternate universe where I can only assume this film was written, filmed, and released before finding some kind of doorway into our timeline and also existing here).

Cathy's Curse was the first of two Canadian horror films from director and co-writer Eddy Matalon, a Frenchman who, like many fellow directors of bonkers cult horror movies, has had a pretty unique career. Matalon made his feature debut in France with The Mad Dog, a 1966 crime thriller. He spent several years after that making music videos for Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot and then directed another crime thriller starring Jane Birkin. I'm not entirely sure what was going on in Matalon's life or career that caused his abrupt swerve into adult films, but he spent the next several years making French porn under the name Jack Angel. After his porn phase, he went to Montreal and made Cathy's Curse. The following year, he made his second Canadian horror film (though it was set in New York City), Blackout, co-produced by Ivan Reitman. He moved back to France after his Canadian horror years and made another crime thriller, two comedies, and a crime thriller/comedy hybrid, the France/Canada/UK co-production Sweet Killing, with F. Murray Abraham, Leslie Hope, and Michael Ironside. He's still alive but hasn't made a film since 1993.

Cathy's Curse begins with a mustachioed man driving frantically to his large Montreal home and rushing up the stairs to berate his young daughter about where his wife has gone. The daughter, holding a weird doll, tells her dad and his mustache that his wife has left him and taken their son with her. What is the daughter, chopped liver? Or maybe she's evil and that's why Mom skedaddled with her brother and not her? Like many other questions raised by Cathy's Curse, there will be no answer. (Frankly, I kinda like having nothing explained by a horror movie. It always takes me out of the movie when a character is like, "This amulet is cursed and must be brought to your mother's grave at midnight on November 12th, struck by lightning, and buried, or all your neighbors will become zombies." Leave me a little mystery, people.) Pops gets furious, tells his daughter that her mom is an evil bitch like all women, and yanks her into the car to go chase after mom and brother. A white rabbit runs into the road, Dad swerves and wrecks the car, the whole damn car bursts into flames, and Dad and daughter die. People, this shit happens before the opening credits even roll.

Many years later, the brother is grown up with a family of his own and has inherited the house, though he hasn't stepped inside it since his mother yanked him out of it, oh, so many years ago. We never hear anything else about the mother, why she left, why she didn't take his sister, if she's alive or dead. Not a damn thing. Anyway, the brother, George Gimble (Alan Scarfe) and his wife Vivian (Beverly Murray) and daughter Cathy (Randi Allen) decide to make a fresh start and move into the house after some family trauma. Vivian has been in a mental institution after delivering a stillborn baby and having a nervous breakdown, and she's still in a pretty fragile state. There's some awkward exposition explaining all this. Anyway, George introduces his family to the housekeeper Mary (Dorothy Davis) and the alcoholic handyman Paul (Roy Witham) who are still taking care of the house and who both live nearby, and he also gets overly excited about the figurine of a nude woman that's still in the house. "My first love," George exclaims. There's also a weirdo elderly medium who lives in the neighborhood (Mary Morter), who drops by frequently.

Cathy is the same age as George's sister when she died, and she finds the sister's old creepy doll when she explores the attic. The sister has already been sending Cathy some psychic messages and guiding her to move the bed sheets with her mind before Cathy even steps foot in the house, but now that she has the doll, shit can stop being polite and start getting real. The movie can never decide if the sister is inhabiting a killer doll, possessing Cathy, or haunting the entire house, and I, for one, do not give a damn. We get a little of columns A, B, and C, and we get it in ways that are a hell of a lot weirder than any of your average killer doll, possession, and haunted house movies.

The rest of the movie boils down to much weird shit happening in a big, old Gothic house with some classic '70s wallpaper. Both Scarfe and Murray share extremely strange approaches to inhabiting their characters, but these approaches are wildly different from each other. Scarfe gives George the Jon Lovitz SNL "Acting!" approach, while Murray seems to be channeling her line readings from some source in the Great Beyond that has never seen a single movie, TV show, or play. Randi Allen, in her only film role, is fantastic as Cathy, though, and she really hooks into the creepy, sadistic behavior forced upon her by her aunt's spirit. She seems like she's having a blast playing evil, and any child who revels in performing demonic characters is a child who has been raised right.

Matalon has a great, unconventional eye and ear for set decoration, eye-popping images, light, performance, and sound design, though his narrative structure, overseeing of editing choices, direction of actors, and storytelling are mighty unorthodox. It's a good-looking movie, but it's also weirdly amateurish and/or just plain odd in certain moments. I find this mixture of sense and nonsense, form and chaos, pretty endearing and exciting to watch. It's the kind of movie where you don't find out what George does for a living until the final third, where the parents let a lecherous, elderly drunk babysit their daughter, where no explanations for any of the supernatural occurrences are ever offered, where Cathy sometimes makes characters hallucinate rotting food, rats, snakes, and tarantulas for no apparent reason, where a detective investigates a suspicious death and tests out some theories that seem like they're setting the stage for later scenes but who then promptly disappears from the rest of the movie. I really think more movies should be this nuts. The world makes no sense. Why should art and entertainment?

You can find Cathy's Curse streaming and on Blu-ray in a really nice-looking print, and I recommend you check it out if you enjoy horror, Canada, the 1970s, incomprehensible weirdness, bizarre acting choices, genuine creepiness, some laughs, or a combination of any of these things. It's Cathy's world, we're just visiting.