SKIN-depth Movie Reviews: Cat People (1982)

With SKIN-depth Movie Reviews, we set out to look at films both new and classic, and how crucial the sex and nudity are to ones enjoyment of the film. Does the film hold up without them or is it an essential component of their success? Let's find out...

In the final pages of Peter Biskind's seminal Hollywood tome "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," there's a couple of pages devoted to somewacky stories aboutPaul Schrader's ego-run-amok during the production of Cat People. Following his unqualified success as a writer, Schrader's star as a director was on the rise thanks toa run of films that were modest successes, like Hardcore and American Gigolo. He then sank that reputation with the wildly uneven, big budget disaster that was Cat People. Schrader recounts his addiction to powder and pills during the production saying...

"Everybody on the film was doing drugs except Nastassja. The drugs were really fucking me up. One day, I had been doing coke in my trailer, I didn't want to come out."

The result is up there on screen, as the film is an incalculable mess.

Universal and producer Ned Tanen were trying desperately to relaunch a bunch of old horror titles to which they owned the rights. This film and John Carpenter's The Thing went into production right around the same time and were both spectacular box office and critical failures upon their release in 1982. While Carpenter's effort has since been recognized for the horror masterpiece that it is, Schrader's Cat People has aged as well as the feathered hair sported by several of the film's leads. It's woefully dated and its sexual explicitness is a key reason why. Nearly all of the nudity is gratuitous, but the script was structured in such a way as to make it integral to the plot. It's a sexy catch-22, to be sure, butthe film isn't good enough to merit this kind of dedication from its actresses.

Nastassja Kinski plays a virginal young woman who opens the film by meeting her long lost(?) brother, played by Malcolm McDowell. From jump street, McDowell's putting the moves on her, but it's not until much later that we learn that the two are the titular cat people who must have sex with one another lest they turn into panthers. Once they are panthers, they must then kill to return to human form, but again, this information is needlessly kept for a sequence more than halfway through the film, at which point the audience is long past needing explanations. The film spends most of its time with Kinski and a zookeeper played by John Heard, who proves to be the worst leading man to ever star in an erotic thriller. His everyman qualities as an actor are useless with such a vile character as this, and the only reason he's here is because Schrader likely didn't view him as a threat to his own sexual relationship with Kinski.

As I alluded to earlier, the whole film hinges on this absolutely perplexing back story about the literal cat people from which the film's main characters descend. The film grinds to a halt—more than once—to have Malcolm McDowell begin spouting some convoluted nonsense about ancient whosamafudge. Couple this with a careless attention to story details that makes nearly every single person in the film a device rather than a character, and you've got a film with almost nothing going for it apart from the fact that it's got a lot of really good nudity. While Nastassja Kinski spends a good deal of the second half of the film in various states of undress, hers is not the first nude scenein the film.

That honor goes to Lynn Lowry, who survives her first encounter with Malcolm McDowell as a panther in nothing but some lingerie, only to have her bra pop open when she hits the floor after falling down the stairs...

By the way, how did he turn into a panther before the prostitute got there? Nevermind, there I go wanting an explanation again.The film is basically an exercise in getting every single actress on screen naked, and if this doesn't prove it, I don't know what else would. The only thing the film can actually count as a positive amongst its technical elements isGiorgio Moroder's brilliant synth score—which gets you through some long stretches where not much of anything is going on on screen—and of course David Bowie's melodramatically brilliant "Putting Out the Fire (Theme from Cat People)." Other than that, there's not much here beyond some really twisted sexual dynamics and nudity that often hinges on uncomfortable.

Then there's Malcolm McDowell, who is in the throes of "I don't give a fuck" disease in this film. His character is introduced and then promptly disappears for close to an hour before returning to become an exposition and sister fucking machine. I find his face in this particular still—where he's getting blown by Tessa Richarde—nicely sums up his involvement with the film...

Now, did I mention that Nastassja Kinski gets naked a bunch?

Because she does...

A whole bunch...

Often for no discernible reason...

By far my favorite nudity in the film is also the most gratuitous by a country mile. Annette O'Toole—for whom I pined through most of my adolescence thanks to Superman III—strips down to her underwear to do laps in the pool, only to be interrupted by Nastassja Kinski stalking the hell out of her. It's gratuitous as hell as there's no real reason she couldn't have kept her bra on to go swimming, but I thank god this movie was made if only for this scene alone because it got me through a substantial portion of my middle school years. Thanks for that, Annette. You get the lone gold star in the cast. Seriously, if you ever—for any reason—decide you no longer want to be married to Michael McKean, hit me up in the comments section below.

In summation, history has only made Cat People more insolent. If you happened to see it in a very small window of time in your life, you might have some sort of sentimental attachment to it;otherwise, it's not much more than a collection ofreally well shot nude scenes. There's far too many loose ends and dropped story threads to make it work as any sort of coherent whole. It certainly doesn't help that the director went off the deep end while making it, but honestly, the stories about the making of the film are far more entertaining than the film itself. I'd urge you to read "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" if you haven't already, and until next time, I'll leave you with producer and crazy person Ned Tanen's ultimate summation of the film from that book. During a screening, Schrader was so coked out that he fell asleep, prompting Tanen to shake him awake saying...

"Listen Paul, if I have to sit through this piece of garbage, you have to sit through it too, you're the one who made it."

I couldn't agree more.

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