La noche de los mil gatos

Eccentric tycoon ladies' man uses his private helicopter to prowl female rooftop sunbathers. Once he gets them to his crumbling stone mansion for a dinner date, he sexes them up before adding them to his "collection"(a row of glass jars containing pickled human heads...the victims' other remains are fed to his pit full of ravenous kitties).

This is actually a semi-stylish junkyard horror outing with a few effective sequences. The story, however, is rather convoluted and comic-bookish...more discerning horror fans may find the goings-on a bit juvenile. That said, I still maintain that this is worth a look, especially if morally unsound oddities are your bag. With a bit less restraint in bloodshed and boob-shots, this could have been near-classic stuff.

5.5/10

Night of a 1000 Cats was not the masterpiece of Mexican exploitation I expected it to be, but is still a solid little gem of low budget filmmaking. Hey, René Cardona Jr. is directing it, and Hugo Stiglitz plays the lead, and thats all I needed anyway. As usual Hunky Hugo plays a rich playboy womanizer, but in this film he is a little more psycho than usual. He lures women to his old gothic mansion, makes sweet love and kills them. He feeds his hungry cats with their bodies, but preserves their heads and adds them to his "collection". No reason is given for Hugo's deviant behavior and his "minimal face expression" approach to acting certanly isn't helping us understand the character. We do get ordinary "I want you to stay with me forever. FOREVER" -clichés thrown in our faces, but they don't make much sense since Hugo seems to be a well-adjusted fellow with no social problems. The other problem I had with "1000 Cats" is the same one that another commentator pointed out: it's very hard to separate Hugo's women, since they all look pretty much alike and all share the same (minimal) personality. The film's constantly moves in and out of flashback, which only adds to the confusion. So, here we have an underwritten, underplayed (but hunky!) character killing what seems like the same woman over and over again. The characters in the film just doesn't work, (except for Hugo's mute butler Dorgo, the mad monk. Right on!). The film could have been slightly faster paced too.

So, what DOES work?

First of all, this is a René Cardona Jr.-flick and it is my firm belief that everyone of his films are worth watching, at least once. His films always have a certain "feel" to them, that I can't explain but enjoy very much. They all have that little extra something that seperates them from similiar (some say identical, but what do they know?) films. Although low budget productions, he always manages to squeeze the best out of his pesetas and present a good looking, well edited and charmy product that delivers the goods, whatever they might be. "1000 Cats" is no exception. In many aspects, it's not what it shows, but what it doesn't show that makes it work. Sure the characters are flat, and the story doesn't make sense, but at least it's everybody and everything is nice to look at, fairly fast paced, well crafted and directed. Just imagine how awful it COULD have been if none of those components would have been there.

Maybe I'm in a forgiving mode, but:

6/10

This is a strange and plot less movie about a psychopath (Hugo Stiglitz) who flies around Mexico City's poshest neighborhoods in his helicopter picking up sexy, bikini-clad women whom he then takes back to his castle where he has sex with them, murders them, pickles their heads, and feeds the remains to the titular "mil gatos" that he keeps in his basement.

Director Rene Cardona Jr. never made what could really be considered a "good" movie in any sense of the word, and this one is especially inept. A serial killer isn't exactly going to be too inconspicuous flying around the ritzy suburbs in a helicopter. Hugo Stiglitz was probably a lot less irresistible to women than Cardona Jr. seemed to think he was in movies like this and "Tintorera". And if one wants to dispose of bodies, a few good-size hogs would do the job a lot more efficiently (and quietly) than 1,000 yowling cats. Also, I might point out that the action of this movie takes place over a lot more than a single night, in fact very little of the action even happens at night.

Basically though faulting the movie's frequent lapses in logic is really missing the point. What Cardona Jr. seems to be trying to do is string together a lot of visually interesting scenes with the slenderest plot strands imaginable, making a movie that is about half avante-garde and half exploitative trash. Unfortunately, some of these scenes aren't too interesting to begin with (the helicopter footage) and some just go on too long (a strange interlude where the killer watches one leggy would-be victim doing a showgirl routine). Some scenes, however, are pretty interesting--especially the scenes with the cats. And as usual Cardona Jr. has lured a number of pretty European actresses (Anjanette Comer, Cristine Linder) to Mexico to swap bodily fluids with Stiglitz and become cat chow. I hope they at least got a nice Mexican vacation out of it!

The inimitable Hugo Stiglitz and his trademark cheekless beard prowls the sunny skies of tropical Acapulco in his private chopper, stalking impressionable damsels to date, strangle and subsequently feed to his thousand-head cattery.

Hugo always looks most comfortable intertwined with the body of some lusty European/American (imported) actress on the other side of her hey day, and his frequent collaborator Rene Cardona Jnr delivers a smorgasbord of tail for him to plunder in this somewhat Gothic-psycho- sex pic.

As an aimless, expressionless (another Stiglitz signature) independently wealthy playboy, he randomly courts four or five women of various nationalities (it's difficult to keep count), but his piece de resistance (almost literally) is the yummy-mummy Anjanette Comer, whom he hovers above whilst her well-to-do husband (Russek) is off earning the dough. Temptation soon becomes too much for her to bear, and so another opportunity emerges for Stiglitz to add to his pickle-jar collection.

Fantastically absurd with a plethora of bare butts and tan lines, copious amounts of cognac, a pantry full of severed heads and the incessant meowing of a thousand hungry felines to clear up the scraps. Simple and mildly effective lusty Latin horror.

This movie should be called Night of 1000 Hours of Helicopter Scenes. If you want to see some sick guy spend twenty minutes flying a helicopter, then somehow seducing a woman by buzzing around her house and stalking her, then maybe you would like this walking disease. Also, instead of 1000 cats, more like 70, and during the climatic end scenes, only 10 cats, with the same scene shown over again until you want to puke. Only good for making fun of. The one redeeming thing about this film was the video I saw it on was made out of yellow plastic, I had never seen that before. In conclusion, I would rather have toxoplasmosa than see this again. Thank you.