Une si gentille petite fille !...

Hokey supernatural thriller about the possession of an innocent little girl by the spirit of a mean-spirited little girl who died in a car crash, and who would've grown up to be the first girl's aunt. The possessed girl now seems to have powers that equal those of the Antichrist in the "Omen" films, although how she got them is never explained, and we also never understand what exactly she is trying to accomplish with her random killings (she even kills the dog!). The film is totally unbelievable and ineptly edited, but there is the occasional effective moment (the scene with the spiders may give you the willies). (*1/2)

I'm not sure what the goal was with Cathy's Curse. It's a mix up for The Exorcist, The Bad Seed, and about a million other evil kid movies. The wintery atmosphere is a nice touch and, for a bit, one could be fooled into thinking this might end up being some lost 70's classic. Nope.

Cathy's Curse manages to get everything wrong from the hammy acting to the not-so-special effects to Cathy's "curses" that she hurls at people. "Cow" can't quite compare to some of the insults Regan threw at people in The Exorcist.

Don't let me confuse you - Cathy's Curse also has a lot to recommend. It's rarely boring and with such a short run time, I could think of worse ways to kill some time.

No, I'm not insulting your mother with that summary. That golden prose is actually uttered (poorly) by Cathy's drunk driving father to his psychic/psychotic child in the first five minutes of the film. It's a pretty good encapsulation of what you're getting yourself into.

Amazingly, I forced some friends to watch this and they actually made it to the end. Unfortunately, some of them only squeezed by, relieving their frustration by punching chairs, screaming into pillows and then, when all else failed to relieve their seething rage, they physically attacked me. Lets just say, I'm not allowed to pick the movies at the video store anymore. Along with the freakish "Pieces" and Doris Wishman's "A Night to Dismember", this film is basically the worst horror film ever made. That might be a pretty bold statement, but Cathy's Curse is a pretty bold movie. The car crash at the beginning of the film is so poorly shot and edited, it will probably give some of you seizures.

Of course the only way to watch this film is on the worst print you can find. I strongly suggest the Brentwood release. The full-frame, non-pan and scan makes the dialogue even more hilarious when it's coming from talking noses at opposing ends o the screen.

As a Canadian, there's no excuse for this exercise in crap.

The unholy spawn of The Exorcist, The Omen, and The Bad Seed, Cathy's Curse feels like a made for TV or family approved riff on all those movies without any of the scares. Poor little possessed Cathy won't curse like Regan in The Exorcist, but she will call people "fat cows" with a nice amount of vitriol.

As silly as it is, there is some great low budget 70's ambiance in here that keeps it from being a total misfire and it's not a very long movie, so it won't feel like a complete waste of time.

Cathy's Curse is a bargain basement version of The Omen meets Carrie, which were contemporary horror hits at the time. It's a truly terrible film that has the added disadvantage of seemingly being only available in prints that are in an atrocious state (in the one I saw, the colours were so bad that the blood was purple). But even if this movie was released on high definition it wouldn't change the fact that it's abysmal.

The story is senseless. A mother takes her son George away from the family home, leaving the father and daughter. The dad isn't too pleased about this, so he jumps in his car with his little girl Laura. They swerve off the road to avoid a rabbit and the car blows up. Thirty years later, the son returns to the family home with his wife and daughter, Cathy. Pretty much right away Cathy becomes possessed by George's sister Laura's old doll and becomes homicidal, killing various people. Laura seems to be an embittered soul, angered by her early death and wrecks havoc via her brother's offspring.

From the above synopsis, I think it's only fair to say that the film, strictly speaking should have been called Laura's Curse. But this is only a glaring detail and this film quite frankly doesn't concern itself with such trivialities. There are many moments of WTF in this film. At one point Cathy teleports from the bottom of the stairs to the top and vice-versa, and her mother, witnessing this, just gets annoyed; she doesn't actually seem to be, well, a little surprised that her daughter has developed the ability to teleport at will, she is merely irritated with her misbehaving child. In another scene Cathy sits down for breakfast and throws her plate across the room at the opposite wall, smashing it to bits, and the housekeeper simply picks it up and seems to imply that she just dropped it, rather than launched it 3 metres over the other side of the room. In other words, people in this movie do not act like Earthlings. A further example of utter madness, is where the medium takes hold of an old family picture then starts talking in creepy voices, getting progressively more and more demented until she smashes the picture on the floor while screaming; she then turns around and says that she's really had a marvellous time and would simply love to pop over again. It's just weird. What perhaps makes these people all the stranger is that absolutely no one can act. The performances are universally atrocious. The handyman is abysmal too, although it's maybe not surprising seeing as he appears to be Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac in a rare acting appearance.

There are one or two occasions when Cathy's Curse is almost effective. And it can't be argued that it's pretty bizarre throughout. But despite all this, it drags. The unintentional hilarity is something to behold but you really need some buddies and beer to enjoy this one.