Our Daily Trailer: CATHY’S CURSE
Ah, Cathy's Curse. One of my most beloved trash horror movies. I recently saw that I was about to hit 100,000 tweets, and after careful consideration, I decided to use the milestone to once again tell people to watch this movie, as I have done probably at least once a week since I first saw it in 2007.
I had no idea what I was in for that day; it was just the random movie I picked to watch (for Horror Movie A Day purposes) from my Mill Creek budget pack. Sounded like a typical piece of junk, Exorcist ripoff from the late '70s, but as it turns out, The Omen seemingly had an influence, as well, allowing for more elaborate (relatively speaking) death scenes and violence. But it didn't forget its Exorcist roots, giving the cursed little girl (named Cathy, if memory serves) a foul mouth that allowed for such howlers as (in response to a psychic medium coming to the house) "Medium? More like EXTRA RARE PIECE OF SHIT!"
But others get to enjoy colorful profanity; one of the first lines in the movie is a man telling his small child "Your mother is a bitch!", for example. And a lot of the dialogue is great even without expletives - a woman casually says "You and I both know I had a nervous breakdown", just as nonchalantly as one might suggest leftovers for dinner. Oh, and the script doesn't know how to be subtle with its foreshadowing, so when an attic door is shown to be stuck early on, someone says "I should oil this door, it sticks. Someone could get trapped up there". It's wonderful.
Sadly, it seems no good version of the movie exists on home video. I was excited by a recent "uncut/widescreen" version streaming on Amazon, and paid to check it out only to discover it was the usual shitty (full frame) copy just stretched into HDTV size. As for uncut footage, it runs a few minutes longer than my copy, but I didn't watch it long enough to find out what was added, as I was too annoyed that I was duped about the widescreen thing. Hopefully someday the original negative will be found and the movie (originally titled Cauchemares) will get a respectable transfer and DVD (or Blu?) release. If nothing else, it'd be nice to see the film's opening text in its entirety, as it's always cropped into being more confusing than it already is. Should they get a proper release going, I'm more than willing to provide expert commentary or moderate one with anyone from the movie that will be willing to talk about it.
