Les chattes se mouillent

It's another one of them 'rich kids who rape and kill for kicks' film, just like The Young, Violent and Dangerous, The Boys Who Slaughter, The Kids of Violent Rome, The Savage Three, Rome: The Other Side of Violence and Day of Violence. This one might pre-date most of them when I think about it, but the culprits involved are no less sleazy and arrogant.

In Holland, a bunch of fannies with tights on their heads break into a house and wreck the place, forcing the husband to watch on while a bunch of them rape his wife. The last guy doesn't want to, saying 'The Cats won't like it'. This becomes a key clue in the ensuing investigation, as Inspector Dutchguy finds clues that lead him to a small coastal town, and the further he digs, the more complicated and annoying things get.

He quickly tracks down the suspects to a gang called the Ravens, but we're not quite clued in on how they operate or what their main point is, and the Inspector finds himself up against their rich, uncaring parents, and a sinister barman with a pet crow that also likes mentioning cats for some reason. The Inspector does however find time to get it on with local attractive prostitute Dutchlady. You get to see his balls.

Apart from the disturbing opening, most of the plot concentrates on the Inspector's attempts to break this weird secret society he has found, and also to find out who the cats are that people are always blabbing about. Luckily for us viewers this is all carried out expertly, with loads of tensions as the cop is an outsider in the town, even amongst other cops. Of course, people are bumped off as he tries to get to the bottom of what's happening, and we get a pretty good flashback as we find out what the cats are all about.

A down point is that anyone famililar with the plots of these films will figure things out anyway, like I did.

This film is now available in all its 98 minute glory on a Dutch (Region 2) DVD for a very reasonable price. The really good news is that the rape scene is nothing like as graphic or as protracted as other reviewers suggest. The five minutes are intercut with the police questioning of the victims. I'm at a loss to understand why four minutes were cut from the original British release as the rape scene itself lasts for no more than two minutes.

My title for this review has a question mark because it is very different from the treatment we have become used to in long-form dramas like "The Bridge". The film is very much of its time. It is certainly not as action-packed as modern American dramas which may be why some reviewers find it slow. I thought the portrayal of Van Der Valk was reasonably true to the novels save, of course, for the philandering with Feodora.

The film as a whole worked well aside from the hippy-trippy bit towards the end which really stamped it as being from the early 1970s, although I think that the basic plot idea or rich kids going bad is one of Freeling's less believable stories.

In an opening scene redolent of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), six masked youths vandalise the property of a wealthy married couple; when the owners arrive home to discover the hoodlums still at work, the husband is forced to watch as his wife is stripped and gang-raped. Uncompromising Amsterdam detective Van der Valk (Bryan Marshall) investigates the case, and comes to suspect a group of privileged teenagers called The Ravens, whose search for kicks has led them to be exploited by a Charles Manson-style svengali.

Because Of The Cats is a little sluggish at times, but its gritty realism will most likely keep fans of Euro-crime films and '70s exploitation more than happy. The initial sexual assault is graphically depicted in all of its ugliness, there's a smidgen of violence, and, with this being a Dutch film, we also get full frontal nudity from both sexes. Eagle-eyed viewers might even recognise Sylvia Kristel of Emmanuelle fame as one of the 'Cats', the elite girls who associate with The Ravens, and who provide the film with its most memorable scene, a spot of night-time skinny dipping that turns to murder.

6.5 out of 10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.

This is a rather good drama, very much of its time, that begins with a graphic gang rape, becomes a meandering cop story before hurtling us into the sex and violence underbelly of communes cum cults cum dogmatic nihilism. For the most part naturalistic and frank, which in part means we get the cop full frontal as well as all the girls (including a very early appearance from Sylvia Kristel) but also a feeling that we are witnessing nothing too forced. Only the later glimpses of the darker activities with the psychedelic edge hint at anything particularly stylish, but the film is none the worse for that. All performances are fine and even the scenes with the 'posh' kids and their parents are well done. A film that could not be made today and an intelligent look at counter culture of the day.

In what seems to almost come out of today's headlines.....a group of rich boys decide to rape and terrorize people for a goof.

They rape middle-aged women in their own house while forcing their husbands to see it all. All this while destroying their personal property. You see paintings get slashed, furniture get ripped up, and personal items smashed just for the fun of it. And these are valuable items. And the rape scenes may be hard to watch for some.

Then we get a police drama. The inspector in question targets the group for imprisonment. We see a lot of technical details about police work. Euro-flicks like to do that it seems. (Remember "Man on the Roof?") These bits almost play like a documentary.

The pace seems to get slower as we move on, but the intriguing characters keep it in focus. And the culprits are almost likable despite their sliminess.

This film is hard to find. But worth a look. The director Fons Radermakers (spelling?) later won a Foreign Film Oscar for "The Amateur."