Cathy’s Curse



Some time in the 1940’s, a man comes home to find that his young daughter, Laura, has been left all alone and that his wife has absconded with their son. Furious, the man grabs his daughter and heads out to chase after her. But while driving on an empty road, he loses control of the car and crashes, causing the car to catch fire, and he and Laura to perish.

Thirty-some-odd years later, the man’s son moves back into the old family homestead with his wife and young daughter, Cathy. But unbeknownst to the family, a lot of ill-will still resides in that house. It seems that even after three decades Laura’s ghost is still royally pissed about her early demise, and she’s intent on expressing that anger by possessing poor Cathy and using her to take out her frustrations on anyone and everyone she can.



Woof. What a film. Cathy’s Curse is a Canadian horror/thriller from 1977, a decade that includes such ghost/creepy children contemporaries as Shock, The Omen, and The Exorcist. Films that, perhaps not so coincidentally, all seem to have at least provided some inspiration to the construction of Cathy’s Curse. But of course as we all know, just because a movie happens to be inspired by decent films, that doesn’t mean that the resulting product ends up being any good. Thus you end up with films like this movie, which just appears to be an amalgamation of different ideas the writer thought would be fun, all cobbled together to form a nearly incoherent, but amusingly puzzling, narrative that does nothing but cause you to stare in confusion, even while you’re sitting there watching it.



To put it simply, Cathy’s Curse is nothing but bizarre. And after watching it you realize that the strangeness began before you even watched the movie, because even the title of the film itself ends up being misleading. Because it’s not Cathy’s curse, but Laura’s vengeful soul that causes all the shenanigans in the film, meaning the film lied to you before you ever bothered to hit the play button. And of course the strangeness doesn’t just start and end there. It’s just one of the many pieces throughout the film that’ll likely leave the viewer either laughing or scratching their head.


Or covering their eyes so they don’t bleed due to all the atrocious fucking wallpaper.

It’s clear that the bulk of the film’s issues are likely due to being a veritable grab-bag of ideas from other films, and then further compounded by not having any of those ideas form a coherent plot. The result is that very little of the movie makes any sense, and almost nobody reacts like a normal fucking human being. Case in point: It is never revealed what Laura’s endgame is with all the shenanigans she’s pulling or what her basic motivation even is. It’s kinda implied that she was corrupted by her father’s blatant misogyny to distrust women, in particular her mother, and that might be why she’s harassing Cathy’s mom so much. Cause, you know, she blames mom for her death. Except it’s really Laura’s own fault that she died, because she’s the reason her father ended up careening into a ditch in the first place. But no, it can’t be her fault, so she blames every other woman on Earth instead and only likes men. Which would be fine…Except then she also starts harassing and tormenting Paul, the male groundskeeper, whom she presumably likes. So the film’s own implied internal logic doesn’t really track at all.



Nor do Laura’s perceived powers have any logical flow or explanation. Are these demon-like powers? Standard ghost fare? Or is Cathy’s mom just nuttier than a fruitcake? Who knows, cause the movie sure doesn’t! Ultimately, Cathy’s possession is blamed on a doll but, oh, there’s also a portrait of Laura with creepy glowing eyes in the attic that might be to blame… Except that the film showed us that only a few seconds after Cathy arrived at the house that Laura was already showing signs of influencing her long before the doll ever came into play. Hell, the poor kid didn’t even have a chance to get out of the car and step onto the driveway before the ghost started bugging her. (That might be the most fast-acting curse I’ve ever seen…) So who knows what the hell is going on there. Like a lot of things in this movie, it feels like when the filmmakers couldn’t make a freaking concrete decision on something (read: anything), their solution was to give the audience multiple options to choose from instead. Consistency be damned.



And don’t think that the bizarre behaviors are limited to Cathy and her ghost aunt, cause the head scratching bad/odd reactions are granted to everybody, because…. Well, I guess the filmmakers just felt like spreading the strangeness around. The housekeeper acts like it’s totally normal behavior when Cathy flings a bowl across the room, and then says “there, all cleaned up” when there are clearly still pieces of the bowel on the floor. There’s a whole scene between Paul and Cathy where you can’t tell if he’s playing a game with her, or if he’s actually pissed. A medium basically has a freakout in the house, then brushes herself off like that’s a totally normal thing to do. Cathy’s dad appears to be digging his own private estuary along the River of Denial with how much he’s blatantly ignoring the odd shit going on around him in his own house (his obsession with an old Venetian-like statue of a naked woman whom he claims was his “first love”, at the ripe-old age of four, is also concerning). For some reason everyone keeps calling the doll a “rag” instead of, you know, a doll (or even a ragdoll) and trying to throw it out (I get that it’s dirty and all, but why did no one just offer to wash it?).


Seriously, it just needs a little dusting…

Most of the oddness though, comes from Cathy’s mom, who ends up bearing the brunt of her daughter’s/Sister-in-Law’s anger. Poor lady is put through so many earthquakes and leeches with this kid that I’m impressed she didn’t snap and try to kill everyone herself. But the best example of all the tomfoolery aimed at her is when she confronts her daughter on the stairs and Cathy suddenly begins to freaking teleport all around her while her mother is busy trying to talk to her. The mother’s reaction to her daughter suddenly defying space, time and all known laws of physics: Mild annoyance. No running. No screaming. Not even the hint a fainting spell. Just continued demands that Cathy answer her. She doesn’t even acknowledge that her daughter is blipping in and out all around her. She just seems to accept it as fact, like it’s a totally normal thing every 8-year-old does at some point. I swear, if it wasn’t so hilariously stupid, it’d be sad.



So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the movie is also ridiculously cheap. The special effects are woeful at best. What little blood there is appears to be some form of thickened, bright red, Tempera paint. Laura’s burnt face looks like play-dough. And the editing for all the ‘supernatural’ scenes is horrendously choppy, to the point where there are going to be more than a few instances where you’re going to be wondering just what the hell is going on. This of course is even further compounded by the community theater level cast, poor framing, and just shoddy film-making in general, with at least one scene fading out before the scene had even completely finished. Which I assumed played out something like this: “Wait, sir! I don’t think they were done…” “Too bad! Next scene!” ←-the director, probably. In short: it be bad.

Oh, also, if you plan to watch this (for some reason), do yourself a favor and find a newer, widescreen transfer. I’ve read that the full-screen versions were so poorly implemented that the color is so off that the blood looks purple, and that whoever did them didn’t bother to pan-and-scan, so a lot of scenes end up including face-less noses talking just out of frame. Fun.



So, poor Cathy’s Curse ends up being painfully rough on multiple levels. I’ll give the film credit for the couple of creepy scenes it did have, including the leeches in the bathtub, and the small swarm of spiders, snakes and rats that were used to harass Paul, because they basically constitute the trifecta from hell for those who are squigged out by creepy, crawly critters. But other than that, there really isn’t anything good or effective about this movie. I can see that they were trying to do…something. But just what that was is mired by the overall ineptitude. For those looking for weirdness and something to laugh at, this movie is a veritable embarrassment of riches from the craptacular Z-grade gods. But for anyone looking for anything even marginally competent, this one can be easily skipped.

Cathy’s Curse is available on a variety of streaming services.

Cathy’s Curse is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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