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Forties to Eighties, suggestion to delirium, cat to pussy. Charred trees and panthers for the tribal sacrifice on the savannah, tinted red to suggest The Archers or at least a Martian ceremony. Then off to New Orleans for the estranged siblings (Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell), a Dixie Les Enfants Terribles. Desire and death inform the immemorial metamorphosis, the heroine's brother watches her asleep and next turns up as a black leopard under a hooker's bed. "Commercial art" is the realm of the lip-biting virgin who prefers a dumpy zoo to the French Quarter, she's courted by the curator (John Heard) but her eyes are on the ferocious feline just captured. The family mansion conceals a dungeon and colors change during nocturnal stalks, the housekeeper (Ruby Dee) offers the advice of camouflage: "Pretend the world is what men think it is." Paul Schrader's psychosexual remake is at its least effective when it acknowledges the original: The wholesome rival (Annette O'Toole) is duly stalked in a swimming pool, and the scene substitutes Tourneur's delicate tension for maladroit jitters. As a garish dream from a repressed lecher, however, it has its own fascination. Reveling in a newfound lushness, his eye prowls and purrs. A high-angled view of a tiled bathroom floor gives McDowell bare and hungry (he contemplates the viscous remains on his chest and promptly wolfs them down), Ed Begley Jr. as Gawky Comic Relief Dude enters warbling "What's New Pussycat" and exits in a blood tide. Il Conformista for the train ride, Dante on the tape recorder and Top Cat on the telly, "a weird metabolism." Kinski above all in a lithe and humid trance, beckoning the camera for a tryst at the edge of the bayou and growling behind bars for a sick-joke happy ending. "C'mon, don't make it sound so perverse!" With Scott Paulin, Frankie Faison, John Larroquette, and Lynn Lowry.
--- Fernando F. Croce |