Leonora has been summoned by her uncle Edmund, whom she has always disliked, to his country estate to discuss her inheritance. She was asked to come alone but brings her husband Richard and two friends, Allan and Cathy. Leonora also reunites with Brian, a psychiatrist whom Leonora knew in the past. Edmond and his housekeeper Anna are not happy to see the others, and more tensions develop: Allan is a drunkard and Richard is fooling around with Cathy. Edmund tells Leonora that she is "inheriting" a family curse: upon her uncle’s death, she will become possessed by a leopard which wanders about the grounds. The specifics of the curse are unclear; there is a leopard which Edmund keeps caged up, and she apparently doesn't so much become a leopard as much as control it, or maybe even inhabit it now and again. The distraught Leonora runs off into the woods as Edmund releases the leopard so it can kill him so Leonora can become the "cat girl" of the title. If you’ve seen the Val Lewton 1942 classic, CAT PEOPLE, you have some idea of the (fairly mild) mayhem that will be unleashed. As in the earlier film, suspense is built up by keeping the matter of the curse ambiguous: is she really a cat girl or is it all in her head? Brian, the psychiatrist, winds up playing an important role, but the writing is weak and things remain mostly muddled by the end, though the conclusion is superficially satisfying, I guess. Barbara Shelley (pictured) is fine in the lead; she became something of a British scream queen in the 60s, not to be confused with the sexier Barbara Steele. The rest of the cast is low energy with no real standouts. The atmosphere is nicely bleak, and there are a couple of visual callbacks to the earlier Lewton movie. Like that film, the studio stepped in here to hype the supernatural explanation a bit over the strictly psychological. Ultimately, fairly ho-hum but watchable. [YouTube]
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