Seven Dead In The Cat’s Eye (La Morte Negli Occhi Del Gatto)

 

Picture: D     Sound: C     Extras: C-     Film: C

 

 

Though it is hard to tell sometimes from the awful print, Seven Dead In The Cat’s Eye (La Morte Negli Occhi Del Gatto, 1973) is a Thriller that never really works.  Outside of not being able to see the murder scenes clearly, the mystery has to do with who is the killer in the house.  Jane Birkin is Corringa, the outside visitor who arrives just in time when she visits her Scottish castle family home and a series of murders break out.  We have seen this before and done much better, but the film though Birkin was sufficient enough to make the movie work, along with its slick title.

 

Like in Ridley Scott’s later film Alien (1979), a cat sees everything, except we take it, a good screenplay.  It becomes so boring that you hope another murder will get the film started, but it drags on and on.  Too bad.  The rest of the Italian cast is not bad, while Antonio Margheriti could have done a much better job with the situation if he had just reevaluated the story.  This is ultimately a missed opportunity.

 

The letterboxed image begins with the scope frame oddly windowboxed for the opening credits, then becoming letterboxed 2.35 X 1 for the remainder of the playback.  Shot by cinematographer Carlo Carlini in Techniscope (an inexpensive version of Panavision) and originally issued in three-strip dye-transfer Technicolor, this transfer and the source are a wreck with bad color, shifting color, big differences in color from scene to scene and muddiness as bad and worse than VHS!  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is the Italian version, which is dubbed and down a few generations in this case.  Extras include a pullout poster in the DVD case, stills section, trailers for this and a few other Italian film titles from Abraxas.  In fairness, I’d like to see this in a good print, but from what this DVD offers, Seven Dead In The Cat’s Eye is more like mud in your eye.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo