Cathy's Curse

Everyone knows there’s nothing scarier than creepy little blond girls, right? You can start a list with The Exorcist, Poltergeist, The Brady Bunch… and so on. The French Canadians bring us their finest offering in the ‘Little Girls Make Graves’ sweepstakes (Thank Hell for Little Girls?) with Cathy’s Curse, a would be schlock-shocker from the heady late ‘70s.

Starring no one and oh-so-thinly scripted, Cathy’s Curse meanders along for 90 or so minutes delivering precious little in the way of scares. Ahh, the Silver Age of Horror movies; I miss it terribly.

Plot? You want plot? You’re reading the wrong stuff, then, chippy, but peep this. Cathy and her magna-drip parents move into a house previously occupied by a small girl who died tragically. Guess what, the dead girl decides her proper closure involves killing everyone with Cathy’s help.

That’s right, Cathy and fam arrive at the house for the FIRST TIME and Cathy is INSTANTLY POSSESSED. Yippee! What follows is primarily an Omen rip-off, which generates (almost) one scare (unless you’re a child, in which case it generates no scares.)

Oh, the potential is there, with the aforementioned creepy Jan Brady on ‘luudes wandering through the old house’s creepy attic, (even though everything is WAY TOO BRIGHTLY LIT) but when she finds the stupid-creepy doll whose eyes have been sewn shut, we know the jig is up.

Soon Cathy is mouthing off at anyone who gives a damn, and holding out her little dolly, (whom everyone calls a ‘hideous rag’ or some-such in a severe case of mob-style misplaced anger.)

This ‘doll holding’ causes victims to become very frightened and fall out a window or something. Little do they know that the real nightmare is really the mommy, who spends the entire movie whining and bitching like a spoiled Valley Girl. The actress decides to add depth to her character by reciting every line in an exaggeratedly halting, petulant mewl. Almost worth the price of admission, I’d say.

The only real tension is created as Cathy repeatedly gets her country bumpkin Grandpa so drunk he can barely move. The unclean implications of these scenes will please any genre viewer. Everyone else will like the part where Cathy gets Grandpa so sauced he’s paralyzed, then besets him with 4 snakes, 8 rats and 1 tarantula, and asks sweetly, “Don’t you like it, good old Pa?”

BRILLIANT!

If you can find Cathy’s Curse, rent it up, but don’t expect no masterpiece. If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably got what it takes to handle this blast of foul air from a past when all out nuclear war was imminent, and people just didn’t give a damn.