The Uncanny (1977) - film review

For years, Wilbur Gray has been gathering evidence to support his theory that domestic cats are not only more intelligent than their owners, but that they have been controlling and exploiting man since the year dot.   One evening, he visits publisher Frank Richards to persuade him to publish his findings in a book.  Richards is sceptical, so Gray tries to convince him by relating three of the cases he has unearthed.  In London 1912, Miss Malkin makes a will in which she leaves her entire estate to her large family of cats.  Her nephew is outraged when he hears of this and asks his lover, Janet, who is Miss Malkin’s housemaid, to find and destroy the will.   Whilst she is attempting to steal the will, Janet murders Miss Malkin, and the cats exact a terrifying revenge.  In Quebec 1975, 10-year-old Lucy moves in with her aunt after her parents are killed in an aeroplane crash.  Reluctantly, her aunt allows her to keep her cat, which upsets her cousin Angela, who begins to bully her.  The spiteful Angela manages to persuade her parents that the cat is a nuisance and must be destroyed.  The cat escapes and helps Lucy in cutting Angela down to size.   In Hollywood 1936, B-movie star Valentine De’ath murders his wife by staging an accident on the set of one of his horror films.  His wife’s cat is none to pleased when De’ath takes up with an aspiring young actress and sets out to administer a typically feline form of poetic justice...

One of the daftest horror anthologies ever to come out of a British film studio, The Uncanny feels uncomfortably like an Ealing-style parody of Hitchcock’s The Birds, with malicious moggies taking the place of psychopathic ravens and seagulls.  The Grand Guignol horror may have titillated the less sophisticated film-goers when the film was first released in the late 1970s, but today it looks so camp and unreal that it isn’t so much scary as downright funny.   

A magnificently tongue-in-cheek Donald Pleasence salvages the film in the third (and best) segment, which rightly goes for black comedy rather than the usual cheap horror thrills.  Cat-lovers are unlikely to appreciate the humour (the kitten baptism gag is a classic), but hardened ailurophobes will enjoy having all their vile anti-cat prejudices reinforced.

If you can overlook the dreadful puns and some truly risible special effects, The Uncanny is passable entertainment, mainly on account of its unintentional silliness and enjoyably cod-Gothic bravura performances, although it is clearly not in the league of the horror anthologies that had previously been made by Amicus and Hammer.  Every cat has his day, and this one just about deserves to be let out of the bag.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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