SnoopyStyle After his wife Irena's death, Oliver Reed has remarried to former co- worker Alice Moore. They have a strange daughter named Amy. She has no friends and hears voices. She befriends elderly recluse former actress Julia Farren living in a nearby mansion who is estranged from her own daughter Barbara. After finding a picture of Irena, Amy starts seeing an imaginary Irena.This is a strange horror sequel where the cast returns but the lead character is dead. Nevertheless, this stands on its own as a spooky little horror. The little girl is spooky herself. It's a moody small scale horror. Other than the original's iconic swimming pool scene, this is just as good. It turns a transformational horror into a ghost movie. Both works on their own terms.

GL84 Trying to help his shy daughter, a man's efforts to give her a friend results in her conjuring her mother as a playmate and spending more time with her to where they find the truth about her and try to stop her before she gets to the child.There isn't a whole lot to this one. One of the better points for the film is the general plot-line. It's a little original and does offer up some potentially disturbing ideas here of the dead mother coming back to her daughter as an imaginary friend, though that tends to fall off quite easily in here. Every now and then, this pops out a pretty nice suspense scene, as the initial walk-through of the house does get some good moments in, as there's a really creepy air going through the place from the large amount of furniture and other objects found to the darkness of the place really makes for a creepy sequence. What also works is the latter scene where she's startled in her sleep from the howling wind, mainly for adhering so closely to horror conventions over the years. The only other thing that works here is the final chase, as the run through the snowy forest looking for her friend, the dogs on her trail and finally finding shelter at the house here for a big final confrontation. These here are the only right parts, but as much good as there is, there's the same amount of bad. This is due to their not being a whole lot wrong since there isn't much at all to the film. Nothing much happens at all in the way of scares, suspense, action or even jumps, and at times very rarely feels like a horror film. There's a bit of potential due to the original plot, but the fact that nothing at all happens really destroys this one. That is the main and central flaw with this one, which is just as bad as it's other one, where it rarely feels like a horror film. This is due to the film really failing to make any real threat associated with what's happening here as though everyone here knows who she is and what happened to her that doesn't come across over to this one. This really could've done something by hinting that the daughter could've started to act like her mother once they let her in on who her playmate really is when she was still alive, but instead this one utilizes the time showing her shyness with other kids and treats the whole affair like a story told by a child with an overactive imagination. This is a really damaging part here as this here not only devalues of lot of what happened in the original but really keeps the film from really embracing what kind of film it really is with the avoidance of being a horror film so much a part of this one. Likewise, the other part that makes no sense here is the relationship of the two women in the house who are given a status to each other but continually deny it without saying why, and the entire point here is lost and quite confusing. These are the main strikes against it.Today's Rating/G: Nothing.

Man99204 I actually enjoyed this film ore than the much more famous Cat People.This film is worth watching for a number of different reasons.Most people watch this film because of Simone Simone. And while I am a major fan of Simone, this is not one of her better films. She has what amounts to a cameo - as few scenes in which she plays the ghost of Irena - the character from the Cat People film.The central character is actually child actress Ann Carter. She is absolutely mesmerizing in the role of a lonely child. Sadly, she made few films before becoming struck down by polio. It is amazing what can be done with a tiny budget - and a great amount of imagination. For a film buff, the fact that this is the first film directed by Robert Wise, makes it worth watching. He has an adept hand at directing even at this very early stage in his career.

James Hitchcock "The Curse of the Cat People" is, officially, a sequel to "Cat People" from two years earlier. The two films had the same producer, Val Lewton, and the same scriptwriter, DeWitt Bodeen, although they had different directors. (Robert Wise, later to become famous for films like "West Side Story" and "The Sound of Music", earned his first directing credit by completing the film after the original director, Gunther von Fritsch, was sacked for working too slowly). They starred the same three actors, Kent Smith, Simone Simon and Jane Randolph, in the same roles. And yet the two films are quite different in tone and style, so different that they could be described as belonging to separate genres. "Cat People" is a horror movie, albeit far more subtle and restrained than many films which go by that description today, whereas "The Curse of the Cat People" can best be described as a supernatural fantasy. The action takes place several years after the events narrated in "Cat People". That film's hero Oliver Reed- a name which was later to be made famous by an actor- is now married to Alice, and they have a six-year- old daughter, Amy. Amy is a strange child, intelligent and imaginative but shy, withdrawn and introverted, and her parents, especially Oliver, are worried because she spends so much time daydreaming and she finds it difficult to make friends at school. Oliver's worries are rooted in his sad memories of his first wife Irena who he believes went mad because of an over-active imagination, culminating in her suicide. (Those who have seen "Cat People" will realise that the reasons for Irena's death were more complex than that, but Oliver has never accepted the truth about his first wife).Amy does, however, make two friends. One is Julia Farren, an elderly, reclusive and half-mad former actress who lives in a big house in the village with only her daughter Barbara for company. Julia, however, is under the delusion that Barbara died many years ago and that the woman living with her is an impostor pretending to be her daughter. The strain of caring for her impossible mother is slowly driving Barbara mad herself, and she conceives an irrational hatred of young Amy. Amy's other friend is none other than the deceased Irena, who appears to her as a ghost. Some have interpreted the ghostly Irena as a mere figment of Amy's imagination, although I don't think that this interpretation really works. Supernatural fantasies, often involving ghosts, were popular in the forties; examples include (from America) "The Ghost and Mrs Muir", "Portrait of Jennie", "I Married a Witch", "It's a Wonderful Life" and (from Britain) "Blithe Spirit" and "A Matter of Life and Death". Perhaps the war had had the effect of turning people's thoughts towards the afterlife. "The Curse of the Cat People" is another film in this tradition, and I think that we are supposed to accept that Irena really has returned from the grave to watch over the daughter of her one-time husband. Lewton, in fact, did not like the film's title and wanted to change it to "Amy and Her Friend" to emphasise the differences in tone between this film and its predecessor. The studio (RKO), however, insisted on keeping the phrase "cat people" in the title to cash in on the success of the previous film. Their marketing strategy, using slogans like "The Beast Woman Stalks the Night Anew", also suggested, wrongly, that this was a horror film like the first. Yet in some ways their choice of title was an appropriate one. Irena, a sinister, threatening character in the earlier film, here becomes a benevolent one, the implication being that the curse which afflicted her in life has been lifted in death and that she now has the chance to atone for the evil she once caused by acting as Amy's guardian spirit. Simone Simon, so effective as the menacing, feline Irena of the first film, has to call on very different acting skills here. The lovely Simone, despite her beauty and obvious talent, never really became a big-name star, possibly because she never seemed able to decide whether she was happier working in America or in her native France. It is perhaps significant that the name Irena, a variant of Irene, derives from "eirene", the Greek for "peace". The film ends on a note of serenity and reconciliation with the breach between Amy and her parents healed through Irena's agency. Despite its low budget and the change of directors halfway through, "The Curse of the Cat People" achieves the rare feat, for a sequel, of being not only as good as the original film but also completely different from it. 8/10