'Do You have a light?'
Welcome back to my dark corner of this sick world.
‘Eeee!’
Here’s a sentence I never expected to hear a character say...
‘Oh VD, I love you’
Okay…
‘How are we going to catch it?’
This is The Uncanny, an anthology film starring Peter Cushing as a man terrified by cats,
who has written a book about how they control us, which he is pitching to Ray Milland.
‘Proving beyond any doubt that cats have been exploiting the human race for centuries’
Who isn’t really buying it, despite Cushing’s track record.
‘But you said that about my book on flying saucers and my theory regarding the pyramids’
So the author tells some stories that provide irrefutable evidence.
‘That girl will be the death of me one of these days, I’m quite convinced of it’
Old Mrs Malkin has recently changed her will.
‘The cats get everything’
Standard clause, but her nephew is pissed and uses her maid to steal the will.
But things go bad.
Well that should expedite matters.
Now she just has to destroy the will.
Really seems like you could just kick the cat out the way, but Mrs. Malkin has more than one cat,
trapped in the larder, the maid is forced to eat cat food to survive
and when she ventures out.
Don’t know why she thought it would go differently this time. And the nephew doesn’t get away with either.
He didn’t put up much of fight
‘To suggest they deliberately decided to avenge the murder of their owner is just too fantastic’
Ray makes a good point, the cats didn’t start it, this was vengeance.
I suppose you could argue they’re protecting their inheritance, but I’d really rather not,
‘Come and see this’
Further proof is needed.
‘This is Wellington. He’s my friend.’
Story 2 is set in the present day and follows Lucy,
living with her aunt’s family after the death of her parents
‘Magic, Tarot, ritual witchcraft? Where did you get all these?’
Her aunt burns her mother’s books…
her cousin is vile,
‘You haven’t got a mommy, you haven't got a daddy, you haven't got anybody’
and as for Wellington
‘The vet gave me the address of a place in town where they do it quietly and painlessly’
But he escapes and returns with a plan.
Despite burning the books on magic, auntie forgot Lucy’s spellbook and…
This is the best of the three segments.
‘You’re not such a big girl now, are you Angela?’
But, even more than last time, the cat is in the right, and it’s not the cat that does for cousin Angela.
That’ll learn you for being bitch.
‘It was the cat that did it’
It just wasn’t, this is more a warning against witchcraft than cats.
You’ve got one more segment to convince me, and this one stars Donald Pleasence.
Really? There weren’t any other pictures of him.
‘I will show you what terror means’
This one’s based in a low-budget horror studio
and opens with a nasty accident as they’re making the Pit and The Pendulum.
Wow, the police are going to be all over this.
‘There seems to have been some sort of mix up in our props department.'
'Most unfortunate. But as far as we’re concerned, you’re free to go ahead as soon as you please’
Accidents happen, no reason you wouldn’t have had an actual blade lying around.
‘Fantastic’
The dead actress was Pleasence’s wife and one look at him with the new girl should tell you what happened.
‘They’d probably say you switched a real blade for the rubber one’
Yeah, that seems a plausible and subtle way to commit murder.
‘It was her big scene and she went to pieces’
The tone of this is very different to the other two,
Which some might say undermines the terror,
‘I just don’t feel scared’
Anyway, as you may have guessed, the dead wife had a cat,
‘A vain empty-headed creature like his mistress’
and as the couple rehearse the iron maiden scene...
inevitable happens.
Okay, however culpable you think the cat is, it’s certainly not as much to blame as Pleasence himself,
the police, and the studio health and safety who rubber-stamped a real Iron Maiden.
‘What do you think I am; an idiot?’
The comedy comes to a somewhat grisly end.
‘Cat got your tongue’
But that isn’t the end of the movie.
‘People used to think that cats were the devil in disguise. I’m beginning to think they were right’
So far they’ve all been on the side of justice but sure.
The cats hypnotise Milland – an ability they’ve notably lacked the rest of the movie –
into burning the manuscript…
Stopping the publication of a book that provides spectacularly little evidence of their secret quest for justice.
Then…
Oh no. I was on the cat’s side but you don’t go killing Peter Cushing.
'Well I better be getting back now, I don't like to be out after dark.'
Thanks for watching. For more Peter Cushing reviews click here.
Cats are regular horror bad guys because they seem to be up to no good.
What other animals are clearly out to get us? Let us know in the commen ts below.