Cathy’s Curse (1977)

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) I saw Cathy’s Curse for one single reason: The TV guide log-line said it took place in Montréal. As this horror film limped to the finishing line, I concluded that it remained the only reason to watch it. A Canadian/French co-production, it features a French citizen heading to Montréal to follow her father’s new job, and both of them are living in a house where very strange things are happening. Don’t bother hoping for too much originality: it’s the standard dolls-making-people evil kind of stuff. Demonic possession, evil dead relatives, friendly neighbourhood psychic, trash-talking young girl, and telekinetic powers used for evil, you know — the usual. Extremely derivative even by the standards of cheap horror films, Cathy’s Curse isn’t as much a sustained narrative as a series of allusions to better movies. Writer-director      Eddy Matalon’s film is not interesting to watch, although it apparently has a modest following in that so-bad-it’s-good tradition. (Although I’ll argue that it remains on the side of so-bad-it’s-bad.)  Even the Montréal aspect is lacking — there’s not a whole lot here to make anyone look fondly upon the city as of the mid-1970s. But Cathy’s Curse’s log-line did not lie: it’s a horror film set in Montréal. It never promised anything good.