The Night of 1000 Cats (1972) Review

The Night of 1000 Cats (1972) Review

 

The Night of 1000 Cats (alternately known as Blood Feast or the Spanish title La nocha de los mil gatos) is about a creepy playboy who lives in a remote castle that looks a bit like Mayan ruins, and he owns a whole bunch of house cats that have a taste for human flesh. He lures sexy women back to his castle, where he has sex with them, then kills them, puts their heads in jars, and feeds pieces of meat from their bodies to the cats before having his henchmen Gorgo incinerate the body.

This movie has a similar vibe to Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. It was made ultra-cheap, apparently only costing $1500, and it’s extremely bizarre and terrible. Whoever made it must have already had access to four things, 1) a ton of cats, 2) a helicopter, which figures prominently into the story, 3) the old castle, and 4) a bunch of sexy lady friends who didn’t mind appearing in front of the camera wearing nothing but a bikini.

The main character is, for some reason, extremely desirable to any woman who lays eyes on him, and his method of locating and impressing women varies from taking them scuba diving to literally following them on his motorcycle and straight up stalking them, but his main means of seduction are flying over their houses in his helicopter and, just, kind of looking at them? It’s completely baffling, and probably breaks more than a few laws, and yet these scantily-clad women seem more than happy to have this random helicopter hover over them and spy on them. This is only the tip of the nonsense iceberg. One of his victims witnesses his collection of heads in jars and is horrified, then he spins her around and starts kissing her, and she’s all into the making out for about ten seconds before he starts strangling her, which she seems completely surprised by. I mean, you just saw his severed head collection and cage full of cats. I guess she was just that horny.

As for the cat aspect, this is where The Night of 1000 Cats is really hard to watch. There is some blatant animal abuse going on, with one of the cats getting thrown over a very tall fence, and another being picked up and dunked underwater and held there without the camera cutting away in either instance. None of it is fake, and all of it is disgraceful. The cats are all real, and I was surprised they actually used so many real cats. I didn’t spot a motionless fake one out of the whole herd. Of course, they aren’t scary in the least, and it only cuts to them every once in a while.

Everything you would expect to be crappy in this film is—the acting, the picture quality, the loop of music used over and over—but it’s also just so incredibly strange, and the strangeness only builds as the film goes on. There’s a part where he looks at one of the severed heads among his collection—a blonde woman—and it goes into a flashback sequence that goes on forever and isn’t even apparent that it is a flashback, so the whole time it’s just a context-less scene of him hunting birds and Gorgo chasing the woman around with shears, eventually revealing she was the playboy’s true love but she was somehow accidentally killed and this may have been what started his career as a cat-feeding serial killer. Like I said, none of it makes sense, but at least it ends in the most satisfying way possible for such a low-grade piece of trash: the cats escape and eat him.

The Night of 1000 Cats is barely a killer animal movie, but I had to review it because it’s one of the strangest things I’ve seen in quite some time. This cinematic oddity can actually be found on Amazon Prime, so if you have a Prime account, you can see it. However, it’s the edited version, clocking in at just over an hour (yeah, this thing isn’t even feature-length), but apparently there’s a different version that runs 80 minutes and has more extensive sex scenes. I mean…it can’t be worse?