The Black Cat (1934)

Directed by Edgar Ulmer -- People on Sunday (1930) and Detour (1945) -- and starring Bela Lugosi (Vitus) and Boris Karloff (Poelzig). Not to mention featuring a black freakin' cat, a modern castle built on a mass grave filled with war dead and dynamite, and home to a crazed Satanic cult leader... this movie has it all. Maybe a little too much. It's like Peter (David Manners), the self-professed crappy writer, wrote it all in a fever dream. Even the ending makes fun of what we just watched, noting (in a newspaper review of Peter's latest novel) that none of it was believable. None of it was remotely realistic.

When Vitus sees a black cat, it triggers him. In no real way, to be honest, except to be overdramatic. This is another instance of the film jabbing at itself when Poelzig tells Vitus to "stop being so overdramatic."

But Vitus and Poelzig have beef. It goes back to the War and to the fact that Virus spent the past 15 years in a prison -- a kind of Hotel California where people enter but can never leave. He left. What kept him going? The romantic in him. The thought of his wife and kids. Well, Poelzig has what he's looking for. He keeps Vitus's dead wife in some sort of Batman shrine in the basement -- a lit stand-up glass coffin, which allows him to admire her dead beauty any time he wants. Oh, Poelzig has also married Vitus's daughter.

Did I mention that Poelzig built his place on dynamite? There are even "self-destruct levers" that can help set it all off. Vitus knows about these? Who wouldn't. I guess the writer and his wife escape to tell the tale, but everyone else goes boom.

I watched this one as the twin bill of a double feature with Murders in the Rue Morgue, fully expecting that I would like The Black Cat much better, just based on who was in it and behind the camera. But hey, I'm not always right. I liked Murders in the Rue Morgue better.

But any fan of Lugosi and Karloff wants to see them on screen at the same time, and there are worse ways to pass a Wednesday morning. Give it a watch.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

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