#The black cat blood island trial#

The combo’s finest moment comes in a surreal moment where they perform the accusatory Sinner Man, seemingly directly to the guilt-wracked Lou, all sporting eye-patches echoing his disfigurement of Pluto.Īnd it’s Pluto, the eponymous black cat, who is the real star of the show, a spitting, snarling ball of venom who radiates menace in every shot. McKay turns up here fronting his own band and doing belting covers of Bo Diddley’s blues classic Hey! Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry’s Brown Eyed Handsome Man, but he was also a member of Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps, playing piano on their 1958 album Gene Vincent Rocks! And the Blue Caps Roll. The nightclub scenes give us a chance to enjoy the musical stylings of Texan Rocker Scotty McKay (born Max K. Their strange relationship – it’s heavily hinted that Lou is either disinterested in sex or incapable – is convincingly realised making the overwrought, axe-wielding finale all the more shocking. The film is claustrophobic affair, trapping audiences with the two damaged leads for much of its running time so it’s pleasing that the performances from Robert Frost and Robyn Baker, stage actors, neither of who seem to have worked in film again, are so good. Hoffman clearly had very little money to work with here – there are essentially just two locations, Lou and Diana’s house and the nightclub Lou freaks out at, with a brief detour to a non-descript lawyer’s office – but nevertheless manages a few atmospheric shots and some inventive directorial flourishes. But his feline troubles are far from over… After his house burns down, Lou becomes ever more unhinged, allowing a replacement black cat into the couple’s new home, hanging out at a nightclub where he gets drunk and picks fights and finally losing what little grip he had on reality and murders Diana, bricking her body up in the basement.

He becomes obsessed with Pluto, believing it to be the malignant reincarnation of his hated father, first plucking the poor animal’s eye out and later electrocuting it to death. It’s clear early on that Lou is struggling with multiple issues, bad-mouthing his deceased adoptive parents and treating Diana shockingly, both emotionally and physically. Lou (Robert Frost) and his understanding young wife Diana (Robyn Baker) have been married for a year and over an anniversary dinner he gives Diana a black cat that she names Pluto.

#The black cat blood island trial#

Like The Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968) and The Horrors of Malformed Men (1969) it seemed an impossibly exotic – if stomach-turning – image and the likelihood of ever seeing the film itself seemed impossibly out of reach.įlash forward many decades and many, many films later and said film resurfaces, an ultra-low budget Texan oddity directed by Harold Hoffman (who had written The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald and Under Age, both for Larry Buchanan in 1964 and would work for him again on In the Year 2889 (1969)) which, despite the violence of that still image, turns out to be a remarkably faithful adaptation of Poe (whose name is misspelled Edgar Allen in the opening titles), the two Universal films in 19 and the episode in Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror (1962) merely taking the title and doing very different things with it. Another one was the horrific image of a young blonde woman with an axe in her head, blood streaming down her face, from a film that called itself The Black Cat but which looked as far removed from what little I knew of the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name. Denis Gifford’s seminal 1973 study of the horror film, A Pictorial History of Horror Movies has featured a couple of times in this blog as the catalyst for an interest not only in the genre as a whole but in specific films, thanks to the wealth of stills that makes up the bulk of the book.