Monster of the Day #3493

Updated on October 24, 2023 By Ken Begg 20 Comments

So…I never got to T-Fest.

I should start with all the stuff we watched on Thursday and Friday, but I don’t have time before work. So I’ll get back to it. Meanwhile, we started the official line-up on Saturday, per usual.

Sandy was going to show Hammer’s Shadow of the Cat, but his blu ray was region locked and he couldn’t get his region free player to play it. So we pivoted to another killer cat movie, The Uncanny. That might have been for the best, because it’s hilarious. Watching a bunch of Brit thespians expertly underplaying in an attempt to make kitties look terrifying was hilarious. Except for Donald Pleasance, who had a lot of fun camping it up like nobody’s business.

I especially like the scene where we dwelled on one typically frightening cat in ominous close-up, as it purred and purred and purred. Never has raw terror been so captured on the big screen.

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  • Dorothy Cobb

    One thing I never understood about The Uncanny is that it’s supposedly telling stories about cats plotting to take over the world, but the stories are about cats avenging their masters.

  • Kirk Draut

    Was it more or less frightening than Boodah when he wants head scratches?

  • 🐻 bgbear_rnh

    “Shadow of The Cat” would have been better if they could decide if the cat was or wasn’t responsible for the death. It was quite inconsistent. I liked the idea that they were all really done in by their own idiocy and the cat was a passive observer.

  • 🐻 bgbear_rnh

    Practice 😸

  • Beckoning Chasm

    I adopted one about two years ago, so I am now firmly in Ken’s camp regarding cats.

  • They purr as they plot death and destruction.

  • Eric Hinkle

    The Uncanny — wait, is that the movie with Vincent Price playing a paranoid loon trying to convince Donald Pleasance that he knows about the kitty conspiracy and the felines want to silence him?

    EDIT: Just checked Wikipedia and I see that the writer/paranoid was played by Peter Cushing, of all people. It feels odd. I just can’t see Cushing as playing such a kook, but he did. And it was Ray Milland as the publisher. I can’t even guess how I made the mistake I did after actually seeing the movie years ago.

  • CFKane

    It’s all the exposed pussies on the screen.

  • While the Brits historically were a bit stricter than the US, under their old rating scale, X was the rough equivalent to an R rating under the MPAA (18 and up, originally 16 and up), PG was A in the UK for Adult (5 and up) and AA would have been akin to PG 13 (14 and up). They just didn’t have an “unless accompanied by an adult” exception to any of their ratings. I have no idea what they rated actual porn or ultra-violent film. Probably just banned them altogether with the rest of the Video Nasties.

    New system is more complicated, but 15 and 18 ratings still have no age exceptions and explicit sexual content has it’s own special category.

  • Oh, also they tended to rate Horror at a higher classification than other genres, regardless of content. The precursor to their X rating was H for Horror and had the same age limitation. So there go all your Universal Monster Pictures that we grew up on as kids.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Thanks for explaining it.

  • Eric Hinkle

    That sounds almost as bad as what Australia supposedly did when they first ran Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. The story is that they removed every single scene with one of the monsters in it. If so, I wonder how much of a movie was left.

  • Ken_Begg

    Yes.

  • Ken_Begg

    And Mike Nelson’s.

  • Ken_Begg

    Ouch!

  • Ken_Begg

    And of course it was the British ban on horror pictures outright in the 1930s that led Universal to stop producing them for years.

  • Oddly, my son was telling me about that earlier today. I can’t imagine it was coherent.

    Of course a lot of the available clips of lost Doctor Who Episodes came from the Australian censors office, who cut anything they thought was too scary.

  • And the first Quatermass theatrical film was released under the title The Quatermass X-Periment because the marketers wanted to emphasize that it was so shocking that it got an X rating. Hence the name change for American release as it didn’t translate.

  • You are welcome.

    As we all know, I am a font of useless knowledge. :)

  • Eric Hinkle

    I never heard that Britain had banned them. Was a reason given for this?

    And this is probably because I’m looking back on their decision after 90 or so years of increasingly graphic horror, but it’s hard to see what was so shocking about the 1930’s Universal horror films.