Review of Cat People

Virginal young pixie (Nastassia Kinski, before a spelling-change in her first name) reunites with her estranged brother (Malcolm McDowell) in New Orleans and slowly comes to realize they are "cat people"--when aroused, they metamorphose into cats. Updating Val Lewton's sleek Gothic drama from 1942 was a terrific idea, but this version doesn't give the characters much of a chance to emerge; everything is so shrouded in mystery and half-realized eroticism. The central casting doesn't work, either. Since we never intrinsically feel that Kinski and McDowell are siblings, the incestuous subtext doesn't come off. Director Paul Schrader and writer Alan Ormsby aren't out to make a psychological thriller--at least Schrader isn't. The accent here is on style, nudity, gore. Schrader harbors a fascination with kinky subject matter--and yet he's aloof, at a distance from the goings-on, keeping the material grounded within a moral undermining. Giorgio Moroder composed a whiplash score, but the film isn't a whip-cracker: it's somber, unhappy, vacuous. Zoologist Annette O'Toole gives it a little goose, and John Heard is handsome if inert. *1/2 from ****