Looking for some retro action, I dug up several flicks from the 1970s to watch. Coincidentally, they all come from 1977 with titles that get alphabetized under the letter C.
CATHY’S CURSE (1977)
If The Bad Seed met Audrey Rose and was made into a terrible 1970s possessed little girl movie…actually, it was. Cathy’s Curse is that very disaster.
The opening scene is camptastic. A dad comes home to find his daughter alone. She says the mom took off with her brother. Dad calls mom a bitch and they drive off then get killed in a car accident because the daughter grabs the wheel to save a bunny in the road. Camp.tas.tic.
Decades later the son returns to the family home with his depressed wife and his daughter Cathy, who, as in most of these scary little girl movies, is already creepy. Where do they get these young actresses?
Cathy finds a doll and sees a portrait of her father’s sister (that sometimes gets glowing green eyes), which triggers her to become a bad seed. Conveniently, one of the neighbors is a medium, which also helps ignite the paranormal events.
Basically Cathy is possessed by her doll. She clings to it each time she magically terrorizes people. She tosses an old woman out a window. She immobilizes an old drunk dude and infests him with snakes, spiders, and rats. She causes blood to run from her mother’s tub and covers her mom’s back in leeches. The raucous score is the only thing that adds any weight to the horror.
For the big finale Cathy chases her mother rather violently, which leads them to the portrait for the lackluster conclusion. This really feels like a made-for-TV movie.
THE CHILD (1977)
It’s another scary girl movie, but this one has a nice twist. It also has that classic warped 70s horror vibe that makes you feel like you’re tripping, with a melodramatic horror score, whirling camera angles, and distorted zooms. If I have to watch a horror movie from the 1970s that isn’t a classic, this is the kind I prefer to get sucked into.
The gothic opening in a cemetery involving a kitten, a tombstone, and a monstrous hand feels very old school, like a Hammer Films flick of that era, but we’re quickly, brought into a more contemporary situation.
A young woman comes to a house to be the nanny to a girl who looks way too old to need a nanny. The girl is weird, but so is everyone in the home.
The first juicy horror is delivered when monster POV terrorizes the old lady neighbor, who ends up getting a gory facelift…
Meanwhile, the nanny begins noticing the girl’s odd behavior, including her slipping out of the house at night to visit the cemetery.
Things get eerie on Halloween. There’s apparently a party outside, but all we get to see is the girl in a witch costume and a jack-o’-lantern she leaves behind, which haunts the nanny a bit.
It’s a slow burn, but finally people start getting killed off in the last half hour. With 20 minutes remaining we finally learn who the girl has been visiting in the cemetery!
It’s a very unique direction to take and leads to a very cool, Night of the Living Dead kind of final act. You’ll either appreciate the mixed genre approach or be disappointed that the plot didn’t choose one direction and stick with it.
THE CHOSEN (1977)
I might have appreciated this one more if I’d seen it back in the day since “child of Satan” films were all the rage back then. This modern society meets ancient evil flick dragged for me.
Kirk Douglas plays an industrialist planning to build a nuclear power plant in the Middle East against the wishes of those who live there.
He soon makes some shocking discoveries. First, his adult son is the spawn of Satan. Second, the structure he is building bears a striking resemblance to a mythical beast predicted in the Bible. Ugh. Religious horror. Wouldn’t you know the son needs the dad’s power plant to facilitate bringing on the apocalypse.
A few people in positions of power fall victim to tragedy (there’s a cool death by helicopter propeller moment), and Douglas suffers from symbolic dreams, but this is generally a boring melodrama. However, a scene near the end in a padded cell is psychotic and saves this one from being forgettable.
