CAT’S EYE (1985)

CAT’S EYE (1985)

Tagline: Through the eye of the cat, a twisted tail of macabre suspense from the author of CARRIE, The SHINING, and THE DEAD ZONE.

(Horror, Comedy, Look What The Cat Dragged In) [PG-13]

Forget the cat, you hemorrhoid! Get the gun!

In this one, we get 3 stories rolled into one movie. Each story has 2 themes in common. The first is a cat and the second is “breath”. The first segment “Quitters Inc.” is about a man who chains smokes and needs to quit. As a means of doing that he turns to “Quitters Inc.” which has extremely unorthodox ways of getting you to stop. “The Ledge” is about a tennis player who gets caught cheating with a high rollers mobsters wife and is forced to try and get around a high-rise building dozens of floors up using only a 5-inch ledge. The last story is “The General” which involves the cat that ties all 3 stories together attempting to save a little girl from an evil creature that comes out of her wall at night. 

First off, in my head, I am always debating whether or not some of Stephen King’s stories are actually horror or not. Here is an example. Last year, I got ripped for posting FIRESTARTER in my November non-horror 80s series of reviews. The reasoning was that Charlie was basically the equivalent of Pyro from the X-MEN and the X-MEN isn’t horror. In this movie we do have some suspense, but is it horror? Until that creature in the little girl’s room does something deadly, isn’t it basically one of the characters from “Fraggle Rock” only meaner looking?

Needless to say, I decided to land on the side of caution this time and throw this into the October horror movie review lineup. Now to the review. 

“Quitters Inc.” for me gets a 4 out of 7. It’s a solid story for the most part and I give King credit for that, but one thing he seems to not be able to nail down in a LOT of his stories is a decent ending. This segment has a poor nonsensical ending that left me wondering if we’d ever get back to the story. Basically, the ending happens with a similar circumstance as the beginning of the same story.  That isn’t an ending, a climax, or a cliffhanger. It just feels like they ran out of film. 

“The Ledge” is a decent story as well, but I can’t stand character flaws involving infidelity. It makes it super hard for me to root for anyone. Without giving away the ending, I will just say, at least we got an ending. For that reason, “The Ledge” also gets a 4 out of 7. 

“The General” is by far my favorite story in this and while it does have some semblance of horror, I found it mostly just awesome. I also liked that the cat was more heavily involved in this story. I won’t give anything away, but this one also at least has an ending. There is one thing I would have done with this script that would have been different, but overall this is a 7 out of 7 for me. 

I have to give CAT’S EYE a final overall score of 5 out of 7. All the stories are well acted and it’s hard to go wrong with talents like James Woods (HERCULES), Robert Hays (AIRPLANE), and Drew Barrymore (FIRESTARTER) in your lineup. CAT’S EYE is one of the better flicks based on Stephen King’s body of work. Fans of King’s will also like the nods to his other films that are laced throughout this movie.

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF DINO DE LAURENTIIS COMPANY AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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