The Uncanny (1977)

A curious film, The Uncanny (1977) represents an attempt by Milton Subotsky to continue making anthology horror films post-Amicus, (The Monster Club (1980) was another attempt).  While the trailer makes a big deal of the film presenting audiences with a new 'monster' more terrifying than the likes of the 'Creature From the Black Lagoon', or the giant killer bear of the contemporaneous Grizzly, the fact is that it is always going to disappoint when it reveals this menace to be the domestic cat.  Another in a long line of horror films that tries to present cats as evil and scary, Anglo-Canadian production The Uncanny, like the others, fails miserably in this respect.  Maybe I'm biased because I'm very much a 'cat person', but they simply aren't frightening, either individually or en masse.  They are also, as I've noted elsewhere, in general terrible actors, needing to be bribed to perform any kind of stunt, even then, their inherent idleness generally kicks in, making it look incredibly perfunctory.  The cats in The Uncanny are perfect examples - all too often they are clearly falling asleep under the heat of the studio lights, or 'attacking' with their tails up - a signal that they have friendly intent.  It is difficult to feel intimidated by these marauding cats when you know that their onslaught could be immediately halted with the offer of a saucer of milk.

Nonetheless, The Uncanny spends eighty eight minutes trying to convince us of the evil of cats via three stories.  The framing narrative involves writer Peter Cushing trying to persuade publisher Ray Milland to publish his manuscript chronicling the evil of cats, relating three tales of murderous felines in order to argue his case.  Unfortunately, while boasting an impressive (for a low budget horror movie) cast, none of these episodes is particularly suspenseful or scary.  The first, set in 1912, is a pretty mundane tale of a nephew and a maid plotting to murder his aunt for her money - she's planning to change her will to leave it all to her cats.  Of course, they reckon without the felines avenging their mistress.  There are no twists to the tale, with everything unfolding in predictable fashion.  The middle story, set in 1976 has a young orphaned girl and her pet cat being sent to live with her cat-hating aunt and cousin.  The twist here is that the girl's late mother was a witch and the cat her familiar, so when the cat vanishes, she is able to use her own magical powers to take revenge on her cousin, aided by the magically returned feline.  Far more macabre than the first story, this one is, nonetheless, still predictable and is let down by poor production values and special effects.  The third story takes place on and around the set of a horror movie.  It features Donald Pleasance as a horror star murdering his co-star wife by rigging the props in the torture chamber set and installing his aspiring actress mistress in her place.  Guess what?  That's right, the wife has a cat that avenges her death.  While Donald Pleasance is, as ever, fun to watch in this sort of thing and the production values not too bad, this episode is, once again, far too predictable.

Part of the success of the anthology films that Subotsky had produced for Amicus lay with their scripts, which were taken from strong source material - usually either classic horror comics or the work of Robert Bloch, (who often adapted his own stories for them).  By contrast, the writing on The Uncanny was weak, based around the slimmest of ideas and offering neither cast nor director much to work with.  A further weakness is that, while headlining three recognisable horror stars in Cushing, Milland and Pleasance, only the latter is really given anything to do - the first two are only in the framing story, doing nothing but talk.  The film represented a curious choice of project by independent Canadian director Denis Heroux, whose previous movie had been the harrowing and downbeat Born for Hell (1976), (aka Naked Massacre), a fictionalised account of a real-life US mass-killing, transposed to Belfast and played out against an uncomfortably realistic background.  In the event, The Uncanny was his last film as director, with him subsequently focusing instead upon producing.  Based on his previous output, Heroux would have seemed to be ill fitted to direct the sort of horror film that Subotsky specialised in producing and, not surprisingly, he is unable to bring the edge of realism characterising his earlier work, to the material on hand for The Uncanny.A box office failure, The Uncanny, feels like a film out of its time, an afterthought in Amicus' line of early seventies anthologies.  Moreover, with its spotty production values and rough around the edges feel, it lacks even the viewing pleasures brought by the earlier films' smoothly polished look and feel.