Cat Girl

Cat Girl was an early outing for the glamorous Barbara Shelley, one of Hammer’s most reliable 1960s’ ‘scream queens’. Opening on the clichéd ‘dark and stormy night’ Leonora and her friends arrive at her family home, revealed as the kind of weird household that James Whale was making movies about 25 years before. There are romantic tensions between the two couples who arrive, while Leonora has also reconnected with an old friend, now a psychiatrist. All these relationships are exaggerated when it is revealed that Leonora is the inheritor of a 700-year-old curse that her uncle must pass on (before committing suicide-by-leopard)!

Of course, this is a belated low-budget British knock-off of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), displaying little of the sensual style of the original, although it tries hard. Released hard on the heels of the all-colour, all-gore Hammer outing The Curse of Frankenstein, Cat Girl’s black-and-white, low-resolution thrills must have seemed positively old-fashioned. The film is also a very British take on Cat People. The original shocker sees supernatural violence erupt when passions are repressed, while Cat Girl represents a typically British fear of what might happen if such feline passions are expressed in any form at all. The film is worth watching today for Barbara Shelley’s striking pre-Hammer performance, and remains an interesting curio.


The best bits of Cat Girl are those that directly ape sequences in Cat People, including the climax of the film. Cat Girl, though, does have a nice line in balancing the question of whether the curse is real or all in Leonora’s mind. She’s seemingly given the gift of control over the leopard, and uses it as a killing machine. However, does she ever actually turn into a cat herself? We do see an out-of-focus transformation into a cat-like creature in a mirror, but this could all be subjective. We also (almost) see Leonora devour an innocent canary.  Although it might be expected in this kind of film, Barbara Shelley’s first cat-like transformation is a shocker, partly because it is unexpected at that point, but also because it is fairly subtle. As her character gives in to the cat curse, she covers her face with her hands. When she removes them, she reveals a dramatically different, much more feline look, complete with slanted eyebrows and cat-like claws… It’s all in the performance.

A typical 1950s’ British B-movie, Cat Girl is restrained and demure where the original Cat People is overt and sensual. However, it has a few great moments and the short running time means it doesn’t outstay its welcome. (Total SciFi.com)